Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Qualcomm recently released a number of mobile processing platforms, including the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform and the first generation Snapdragon AR2 platform. Among them, the second generation Snapdragon 8 adopts the architecture of 1-4-4-3, its CPU performance is 35% higher than that of the previous generation, and its energy consumption is reduced by 40%. In addition, the hardware light tracking acceleration, AI, ISP and other aspects have also been improved.

Phoenix New Media Technology also communicated with several vice presidents and senior directors of Qualcomm in charge of CPU, GPU, AI and other technologies after this year's Snapdragon Summit to learn more about the second generation Snapdragon 8.

The performance improvement of the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform CPU is an unavoidable topic for Snapdragon's new products every year. However, unlike in previous years, Qualcomm replaced the CPU core with a combination of 1-4-4, changed the performance core to two Cortex-A715 and two Cortex-A710, and reduced the energy efficiency core to three Cortex- A510R. The reason for adopting such a core combination, Qualcomm explained that in order to take into account a certain number of 32-bit applications still on the market. "if we only use A715, there will be a problem, that is, we can only run on the efficiency kernel when running 32-bit applications, which will undoubtedly sacrifice the relevant performance." Qualcomm said that under the current architecture, A710 can ensure performance while taking into account the smooth use of 32-bit applications, compared with software translation to lose the efficiency of application operation, Qualcomm believes that retaining A710 is a more appropriate choice.

After keeping the A710, why cut another energy efficiency core is what I am more curious about when communicating. Qualcomm can keep four energy efficiency cores because the new core was released at the same time as the Arm released a reference architecture such as 1-4-4. On this issue, Qualcomm believes that the eight cores are an upper limit for smartphones, coupled with the market's "growing demand for performance cores, while declining demand for efficiency cores." the combination of these two reasons prompted Qualcomm to make strategic adjustments to reduce the core of energy efficiency. At the same time, Qualcomm said that this adjustment does not have a negative impact on the overall power consumption of the platform, but improves the overall performance in the low-power state.

However, the increase in the performance core does not mean that the platform will make less use of Cortex-X3 super cores. In communication with Qualcomm, Phoenix New Media Technology learned that Cortex-X3 is specifically for single-threaded heavy workloads. For multithreaded work, the platform uses both super-large cores and four performance cores, but for single-threaded high-load activities, it still mainly relies on super-large cores.

In addition to the improvement in CPU, the hardware acceleration support of the second generation Snapdragon 8 is the most popular part of the offline experience of this Snapdragon Summit. Games brought by Qualcomm, OPPO and NetEase against the current also demonstrate the effect of light chase on mobile games. Qualcomm also said in its communication that through targeted hardware design and cooperation with different game engines and game studios, the light pursuit technology of the second generation Snapdragon 8 can maintain a power consumption of less than 5W. However, the specific game performance still requires the joint efforts of various OEM manufacturers and game manufacturers. To this end, OPPO also announced a new generation of light pursuit development tool PhysRay SDK to help game development.

The performance of CPU affects the fluency of daily use of mobile phones, while GPU is related to the usual game performance, so these two points are the most important for consumers. But beyond that, Qualcomm spent a lot of time at the summit showing the AI enhancements of Snapdragon 8, the second generation, and what new features these enhancements can bring.

The second generation Snapdragon 8 supports INT4 precision operation first of all in terms of operation speed. Through this micro-slice reasoning technology, Qualcomm said that the second generation Snapdragon 8 can greatly reduce the corresponding power consumption while improving processing power, and control it on the hardware side to further cooperate with the software. At the same time, Qualcomm said in its communication that they attach great importance to integer processing in terms of AI performance. This new support for INT4 precision and further support for mixed precision will enable the second generation Snapdragon 8 to effectively combine integer and floating-point precision support in the face of loads including language processing. These improvements allow more functions and models that need to be connected to the server to run locally. For example, the local translation tool Xiaomi brought at the summit allows the device to generate offline real-time subtitles in two different languages for video.

In addition to computing support, AI capabilities have also entered the image processor (ISP). At the summit, Qualcomm launched its first "cognitive ISP", which can be semantically segmented and processed separately for different elements of the scene on hardware. Although the ISP throughput of this generation still maintains 3.2 megapixels per second, through the partnership between the AI engine and Cognitive ISP, Qualcomm says this generation can bring better dark light photos and photo details in the same scene. Coupled with cooperation with Sony and Samsung on image sensor technology, Qualcomm believes that this capability will enable OEM manufacturers to put image functions on their products more quickly. At the end of the communication, Qualcomm also said bluntly that if Sony, Samsung and other image sensor manufacturers have plans to improve pixel throughput, Qualcomm's ISP processing speed will also increase synchronously.

This second-generation Snapdragon 8 upgrade, whether in CPU, GPU performance and energy efficiency, or in AI and related capabilities have a good improvement. For consumers, an excellent mobile processing platform is not only the high running score of the test software, but also the more practical function brought by the ability improvement. This not only depends on chip manufacturers like Qualcomm to improve the capability of the hardware itself, but also requires the cooperation of various OEM factories and software factories to give full play to the performance of the hardware. The light pursuit support of Snapdragon, the improvement of AI performance and so on also make me look forward to the performance of manufacturers' products after landing. Pay attention to Phoenix New Media technology and Phoenix evaluation, follow-up we will also bring firsthand and more detailed product content.

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