Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 leak points to bizarre CPU configuration
TheSnapdragon 8 Gen 1is the current top-of-the-line for Android smartphones, but theSnapdragon 8PlusGen 1should start appearing soon. This is just a tiny speed bump over the current flagship, but a leak on the Chinese Weibo social platform suggests the follow-up system-on-a-chip (SoC) will be something of a departure. SM8550 chipset, which we expect to be released as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, reportedly hasfourdifferent CPU islands, making for a more complex design than the Gen 1.
The leak includes several things we expected to see in Qualcomm’s new chip, including a 4nm process from TSMC and an Adreno 740 GPU. But it’s the alleged CPU setup that has us scratching our heads. TheWeibo postclaims the 8 Gen 2 will use four different CPU core designs, some of which are unannounced and others are a year old. The single Cortex-X3 is one of the unannounced cores, along with a pair of A720s. However, the leak says there will be two A710 cores, which are in the current Gen 1. Then we get three A510s to finish it off. That still adds up to eight CPU cores, but they’re in four groups (1+2+2+3).
To put this in context, the current Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 has a 1+3+4 configuration. That’s one Cortex-X2 “prime core,” three Cortex-A710s, and four low-power Cortex-A510s. This triple-island design has been the standard for Qualcomm since the Snapdragon 855 in 2019, which introduced the prime core for faster single-threaded operations. Having four low-power cores has also been the standard since time immemorial. It’s unclear how Qualcomm might choose to manage an odd number of A510s.
Esper’s Mishaal Rahman suggests the weirdness is thanks to 32-bit app support (AArch32). Newer cores like the unannounced Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A720 most likely will not have support for 32-bit apps, but that’s still a necessity in the Chinese market. Thus, the Gen 2 slaps a pair of A710s in there to fulfill the need. However, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 might be the last flagship part from Qualcomm to offer this feature, unless the company wants to hamstring future designs for the sake of ancient apps.
If Qualcomm’s pattern holds, we’ll start getting details about the SM8550 later this year, and then it’ll announce the chip in full just before it begins to appear in phones like the Galaxy S23 early in 2023.
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