Qualcomm intros 5G mobile platform Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

Chipset major Qualcomm Technologies introduced its premium 5G mobile platform called Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.
Qualcomm during the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021 said the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will be adopted by OEMs and brands including Black Shark, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Realme, Redmi, SHARP, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE. Smartphone OEMs are planning to launch their 5G smartphones – powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 — by the end of 2021.

5G smartphone production for 2022 is expected to reach 660 million units, translating to a market share of 47.5 percent for 5G handsets in the overall smartphone market. The share of 5G smartphones will be hitting 37.4 percent in 2021, with about 500 million units produced, says TrendForce.

The San Diego, California-based company is the biggest supplier of the chips that power many Android phones, competing against rivals such as Taiwan’s MediaTek and Samsung Electronics, which uses Qualcomm chips in some of its phones but self-supplies chips for some models.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip released Tuesday will have similar computing cores to rivals like MediaTek, which this month announced a chip aimed at premium phones. But almost every other part of the chip are custom designed by Qualcomm, including those playing a role in the visual quality of photos and graphics-intensive apps like games.

“I’ve got the biggest CPU and I can hit a benchmark that lasts one minute. We have all these capabilities, and it’s really about the user experience. That’s going to make a difference,” Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile, compute and infrastructure for Qualcomm, said.