During the Snapdragon Summit 2022, Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC, the new Qualcomm S5 and S3 Gen 2 Sound Platforms, and the Snapdragon AR2 platform aimed to revolutionize AR glasses. Qualcomm had a busy two-day event, announcing groundbreaking and impressive new products that will change the industry, and bring massive changes to upcoming and future products.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship SoC
The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform aims to “revolutionize flagship smartphones” with a new enhanced experience. The flagship mobile platform delivers up to 25% faster GPU performance, and packs up to 40% more power-efficient Kryo CPU, providing extended battery life when playing graphics-intensive games.
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The new Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF System features AI features to improve the upload and download speeds, reduce the latency, improve the coverage, and enhance power efficiency. It even supports Wi-Fi 7, and there’s even dual Bluetooth connectivity for sustained immersion.
The new flagship mobile platform offers the best of all worlds, and it’s more secure, has support for more immersive sound technologies, and even supports 48kHz lossless music streaming for even more detail. If you want to find out more, we recommend you visit our dedicated Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform page, where we tell you all about the new changes and improvements.
Qualcomm S5 and S3 Gen 2 Sound Platforms
Qualcomm announced the most advanced Bluetooth audio platforms to date, the new Qualcomm S5 Gen 2 Sound Platform, and the Qualcomm S2 Gen 2, supporting the Snapdragon Sound technology. The new platform is optimized to work on the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, bringing advanced utilities to the masses, including spatial audio with dynamic head-tracking, improved lossless music streaming, and low, 48ms latency between phones and earbuds for a more immersive experience.
The platform also supports the third-generation Qualcomm Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation, which improves the listener experience by adapting to both in-ear fit and the user’s external environment. The new Adaptive ANC technology also includes the Adaptive Transparency feature, which can recognize speech detection. This mode can seamlessly transition between the noise canceling and natural sounding leak-through features, enabling the user to hear the environment around them.
The Qualcomm S5 and S3 Gen 2 Sound Platforms are expected to be commercially available sometime in the second half of 2023.
Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 Platform
AR glasses are the next big thing, and Qualcomm is delivering a new technology that will “unlock a new generation of sleek, highly capable glasses.” The new Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1 Platform is built from the ground up to help revolutionize the heardworn glass form factor.
To help achieve a small form factor, Qualcomm worked on creating the thinnest possible, high-performance AR glass. The company built a multi-chip distributed processing architecture combined with customized IP blocks. Thanks to the advancements in this field, Qualcomm achieved some impressive results.
The main processor occupies 40% smaller PCB area on the glass, and the overall platform delivers 2.5x better AI performance while consuming 50% less power. The glass consumes less than 1W of power, making the experience more comfortable and realistic for both consumers and enterprise users.
To balance the weight and decrease the arm width on either side of the glasses, the Snapdragon AR2 uses a multi-chip architecture that includes an AR processor, AR co-processor, and connectivity platform. To ensure low latency, the glasses process latency-sensitive information directly on the device. At the same time, the more complex data is offloaded to a Snapdragon-powered smartphone, PC, or other compatible devices to help preserve power and become more efficient.
Specifications & Technology
The AR processor is optimized for low motion-to-photon latency. It supports up to nine concurrent cameras for user and environmental understanding. It uses a dedicated hardware acceleration engine that improves user motion tracking and localization. AI accelerators reduce latency for sensitive input interactions such as hand tracking or 6DoF (Six degrees of freedom), and a projection engine for a smoother experience.
The AR co-processor aggregates the camera and sensor data, and enables eye tracking and iris authentication for foveated rendering. This ensures that the workloads are optimized, and only process content when the user looks at the content or uses the glasses. The co-processor helps reduce power consumption, extending the battery life even further.
The Snapdragon AR2 uses the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 connectivity system to take advantage of Wi-Fi 7, which yields low latency between the AR glasses and the user’s smartphone or other compatible devices. The FastConnect XR Software Suite 2.0 provides better control of XR data that improves latency, and reduces the jitter and unwanted interference that could degrade the performance.
AR Ecosystem
Qualcomm recognizes that in order to provide a suitable end-to-end solution, it’s important to finalize both the hardware and the software to build immersive experiences. To help developers build on top of this new technology for upcoming and future AR products, the company made sure to optimize the Snapdragon AR2 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Platforms to be Snapdragon Spaces Ready.
The Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform is designed to be the foundation that will pave the way for developers to reimagine headworn AR content, and help propel the AR glass market in the coming years ahead.
Snapdragon Compute Platforms
During the Snapdragon Summit event, Qualcomm also outlined its vision to advance mobile computing with innovative AI collaborations that drive the convergence of mobile and PC to bring mobile innovations to Windows 11 PCs. Qualcomm partnered with industry-leading companies, including Microsoft, Adobe, and Citi, to deliver AI-enhanced experiences to thin and fanless products. These companies also expressed support for the Snapdragon Compute Platform to help push the PC industry to help modernize with cutting-edge technologies.
Qualcomm and Microsoft are transforming modern laptops with powerful performance, neural processing, and industry-leading efficiency of Snapdragon Compute Platforms. This collaboration has enabled new AI-accelerated experiences for Windows 11 users, including through Windows Studio Effects, Voice Focus, and Background Blur. Automatic Framing and Eye Contact are all possible on the recently unveiled Microsoft Surface 9 5G laptop, using the Microsoft SQ3, powered by Snapdragon (based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3).
The Snapdragon chip can intelligently offload computationally intensive and expensive tasks to a dedicated AI engine, which can free up CPU and GPU resources that help deliver an even better experience with increased performance and better power efficiency.
The Windows Developer Kit 2023 – powered by Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 – makes it easier for developers to utilize the dedicated AI engine and enhance their experiences, regardless of whether it’s for gaming, productivity, or the making of a creative application.
Adobe and the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3-powered developer kit
Adobe used the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3-powered developer kit to ensure its Creative Suite utilizes dedicated AI-processing capabilities for a more personalized experience that pair with Adobe Sensei. Adobe today also announced that in 2023, the company would make its key Adobe Creative Cloud applications native for Windows 11 PCs powered by the Snapdragon Compute Platforms.
Qualcomm & Citi
The Snapdragon Compute Platforms enable new levels of productivity and collaboration while advancing sustainability goals. Today, Citi announced the transition of more than 70% of its 300,000 global users to mobile compute products, including devices powered by Snapdragon, such as the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s.