Another year, time for another flagship-grade Snapdragon mobile platform, although the Groundhog Day vibes are a little more poignant this year. Despite the new name, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the ninth major annual smartphone platform release in the flagship Snapdragon series. It’s also the 18th model in the 8-series, once you total up all the Plus and other variants. Just to make things more confusing, Qualcomm has also decided to drop numbering from its Adreno GPU, Hexagon DSP, and other assorted parts within the chip.
To mark the name change, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 boasts Qualcomm’s first Armv9 CPU cores, a beefed-up 18-bit triple image signal processor (ISP), and better than ever machine learning (ML) number-crunching capabilities. All pretty typical improvements, based on previous years, and there are a few smaller changes tucked away inside the SoC too. So let’s get into exactly what’s new and what we can expect from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.