Samsung is just underpowered in comparison to TSMC. Still 4nm
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is a flagship chipset that has somewhat failed to meet expectations, lagging behind the Dimensity 9000, at least according to benchmarks. The chipset has been manufactured by Samsung using a 4nm process, which explains their underwhelming performance. Samsung has an issue with keeping up with TSMC-based chipsets when it comes to performance. This is shown with the Galaxy S22 Ultra series, where the Exynos 2200 phone performed worse, even the AMD collab couldn’t save it.
Qualcomm has a tradition of releasing an updated version of their chipsets. Today, they have recently announced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset promising up to 30% better battery efficiency. This time, the chipset is manufactured by TSMC which should promise an even better performance both on benchmarks and in practice.
This 15% increase is very significant and should not be overlooked. If a phone uses this chipset, given that it is optimized, videos can be streamed for an additional 1 hour and 30 minutes more than the previous chipset.
Other than these changes to improve battery life, everything else seems to be the same. The chipset supports up to 16GB LPDDR5 RAM of up to 3200MHz and supports UFS 3.1 storage. It supports 10-bit rendering as well as displays of up to QHD+ resolution at 144Hz, or 4K screens at 60Hz, in addition to HDR10+ support.
It still has the previous flagship’s Snapdragon X65 modem that theoretically can be as fast 10Gbps. The FastConnect 6900 system supports Wi-Fi 6/6E of up to 3.6GHz. It has Bluetooth 5.3 with support for Bluetooth LE lossless audio for wireless audio devices.
The camera specifications remain the same. It uses the same triple-cam 18-bit Spectra ISP that can manage up to 200MP on a single camera and caps at 8K for video capture at 30fps (or 4K@120fps). It also retained the same AI-based image improvements like multi-frame noise reduction and staggered HDR for truly high-quality and sharp picture-perfect images. Like the SD8G1, it also supports Dolby Vision, HLG, and HDR10+ video formats.
That’s mostly about it. This improved chipset has taken feedback from reviewers, manufacturers, and consumers to improve the performance and battery consumption efficiency. This is successfully done by moving the manufacturing process from Samsung to TSMC, which they should have done in the first place. We’re waiting for benchmark results. However, GSMArena apparently has been lent a prototype ASUS ROG phone for use in benchmark and performance testing.
You can find the testing here. To give you context, the phone blows the previous SD8G1 chip out of the water in Geekbench 5’s multi-core test scoring a hair away of 4200 points. Single core score shows 1316 points. This test was performed by using their highest-performing SD8G1 phone and the given prototype Asus ROG Phone.
For AnTuTu, the chipset finally managed to defeat the Mediatek Dimensity 9000 and again destroys the previous SD8G1 chip with a score of 1,120,035 points, versus the SD8G1’s 985,115, and the Dimensity 9000‘s 1,080,735 tested using the Vivo X80, which is currently the highest-performing Dimensity 9000 phone on AnTuTu and the highest overall, up until this point.
Among the first phones to use this chipset include the Xiaomi 12 Ultra, the Motorola Frontier, Realme GT2 Pro Master Edition, the OSOM phone (a phone from the original team behind the Essential phone), the Asus ROG Phone 6, OnePlus 10 Ultra, and the Vivo iQoo 10 Pro
Source: Qualcomm