Before the holiday rush and the onslaught of products at CES and MWC, the Qualcomm – the component manufacturer has its yearly opportunity to lay out its major ambitions for the coming year at the Snapdragon Summit, which is currently under way. Naturally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the big news. Most of the flagship Android devices will be powered by that chip starting in 2019—at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 is probably released in the middle of 2023.
For people who have been tracking the industry for the past few years, Qualcomm’s decision to make AI/ML the focal point of its most recent system on a chip is probably not shocking. The new system on a chip, which has the new Hexagon Processor (a Qualcomm trademark, mind you) at its core, offers up to 4.35x improvements in areas like natural language understanding.
The company claims that these improvements are because they were able to power services like real-time multilingual translation given that they are using the only Micro Tile Inferencing method in the industry. In other words, by using these intricate networks, you may speak into a language translator and have it translated into a number of different languages.
The other substantial component there is computational photography. Before the shot is taken, the system can identify and separate various parts of an image. It uses a portrait as an example, segmenting the face, background, clothes, and hair into separate parts. In image products like Portrait mode, where depth sensing is crucial, it will undoubtedly be a feature.
Before the end of the year, the first Gen 2 devices are anticipated. ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU, and ZTE are among the phone manufacturers who have signed up for the SoC.
