Qualcomm’s Mid-Cycle Snapdragon Improvements and Breakthrough for Wireless AR
Summary
Qualcomm’s mid-cycle Snapdragon flagship refresh is more substantial than just a slight performance increase, the latest 7-series chipset is aiming at Asian gaming phones, and its XR division hits a significant milestone.
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1
Qualcomm typically announces its flagship “8” series mobile chipset late in the year. A bunch of Chinese vendors then compete to rush out the first phones before the end of the calendar year, and volume sales start in February or March. By mid-year, Qualcomm often releases an updated, tweaked version with slightly better performance due to binning (choosing the best chips from a run) and process improvements.
This year is slightly different. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 launched late last year like normal, and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 was announced in May. However, the gains that Qualcomm is promising for the 8+ Gen 1 are more substantial than usual: 10% gains in both CPU and GPU performance, while also cutting power requirements by 30%. Combine both the faster performance and lower power requirements and you end up with better performance and 15% better battery life, which translates into real world improvements such as an additional 80 minutes of streaming or an extra hour of gaming. Qualcomm is able to get such meaningful changes because the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is a process change: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is produced on Samsung’s 4nm, and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is built on TSMC 4nm. Process descriptors like “4nm” only loosely relate to the technical die size, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that Samsung 4nm is not the same as TSMC 4nm. In addition to giving customers of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 faster and longer-lasting devices, having dual sources for its premium chips provides Qualcomm with some supply chain resilience, which may be the more valuable attribute in the current environment.
The original Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will remain in the market; the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 does not replace it.
From a competitive perspective, the new chipset does not change much. Apple and Google are still building their own silicon; Apple’s A15 Bionic maintains a performance per watt advantage, and Google’s Tensor is more about providing differentiation than any specific performance claims (though we will have to see what the Tensor 2 is like when it arrives later this year on the Pixel 7). For everyone else, the only real alternative to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is MediaTek’s new Dimensity 9000. While MediaTek has some design wins, the Dimensity is MediaTek’s first real foray into the super-premium segment, and the Dimensity 9000 does not support mmWave, which is irrelevant in China and Europe, but remains a checkbox item for U.S. flagships. (MediaTek just announced mmWave support in an upcoming Dimensity chipset; Techsponential will cover that in a separate report.)
Snapdragon 7 Gen 1
Qualcomm’s other silicon announcement, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, is notable for its branding and market positioning. The 7-series was well established as a way for OEMs to provide good processing and graphics at a bit of a price discount. The new version has the usual mix of performance improvements for the category, along with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon [Series] Gen [number] branding, which has not gotten any less confusing or difficult to type with familiarity. The most interesting aspect of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is not its naming or any specific technical improvement, but Qualcomm’s positioning: this is being pitched as a chip for gaming phones. The highest end gaming-specific phones use Qualcomm’s 8 series, along with unique cooling systems; they tend to be sold in Asian markets in small numbers at high price points. Calling the 7 series ideal for gaming is smart: it won’t prevent any vendors from using it in budget flagships, but it might open sales for price sensitive gaming-oriented buyers …or at least it gives vendors something to talk about aside from camera specs.
This is the same market that MediaTek is going after with its Dimensity 8000 chipset, which is a step below its flagship Dimensity 9000, but with better GPU performance than its 1000 series. In that sense, Qualcomm’s positioning could be impactful.
XR2 Wireless AR Reference Design
From a silicon engineer’s perspective, AR and VR look a lot alike, so Qualcomm marketing lumps them both together as “XR,” even if the end user experience – and the technology surrounding it – is often wildly different between the two. Qualcomm’s latest XR announcement is for AR, giving its market leading XR2 platform the ability the ability to wirelessly drive glasses away from the processor. In theory, this opens up much richer AR experiences without the annoyance of a tether between lightweight glasses and a heavier and hotter device containing the processor, wide area connectivity, and the battery. Qualcomm makes reference designs that companies like Lenovo then take and customize for their specific customer profile.
Wireless AR is a major achievement, and Qualcomm’s R&D should be commended for getting it to actually work. However, on its own, this is a building block, not a revolution. The glasses will still need enough battery to power the optics and local connection to the processing device – they’ll look slightly less like a Doc Brown contraption and more like regular glasses, but some part of the design is going to be bulky to house the electronics and batteries. The optics engines available today are constrained by some combination of field of view, resolution, brightness, flickering, and image solidity. Despite these limitations, there are enterprise use cases where a tether was an impediment to use, so Qualcomm’s latest reference design should be a part of the toolkit for developers creating custom enterprise AR systems. However, no one has yet articulated a set of consumer use cases attractive enough to justify purchase of AR glasses and then built out the software, interfaces, controllers, and services needed to bring it to reality.
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