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

Qualcomm officially unveiled a new generation of flagship mobile platform Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 at the 2022 Snapdragon Technology Summit on November 16, and the first batch of phones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be available soon. But about Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform some details, I believe many friends do not know very well. Not long ago, CTOnews.com participated in interviews with Qualcomm executives at the event and learned more about Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform.

The Qualcomm executives attending this interview are as follows:

Ziad Asghar, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies (head of Snapdragon AP Technology)

Judd Heape, Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies (in charge of imaging technology)

Karl Whealton, Senior Director of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies (in charge of CPU related technologies)

Salman Saeed, Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies (in charge of GPU related technologies)

Dave Durnil, Senior Director of Engineering and Technology, Qualcomm Technology (in charge of games)

Vinesh Sukumar, Senior Director of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies (Director AI)

In the interview, CTOnews.com asked about the two new sensors IMX800 and IMX989 jointly developed by Qualcomm and Sony, that is, many mobile phone manufacturers choose to customize the sensors with Sony in order to pursue the differentiation of high-end phones. I believe everyone will wonder whether the move of Qualcomm and Sony to jointly develop sensors runs counter to the demand of mobile phone manufacturers to pursue differentiation on high-end phones. And whether mobile phone manufacturers can make further customization on the basis of these two sensors?

Qualcomm executives gave a more detailed answer to this question. First of all, Qualcomm said that the focus of its cooperation with Sony on sensors is on four-exposure digital overlay (DOL) HDR technology, as well as the related features of low power consumption of sensors. Qualcomm's partnership with Sony is more about improving image quality and reducing power consumption, so that all OEM can benefit. Of course, manufacturers can also work directly with Sony to create customized products. So they think there will be no conflict between the two, Qualcomm's goal is to make the image sensor play to the extreme on Snapdragon Mobile platform.

At the same time, Qualcomm said it will continue to work closely with partners such as Sony and Samsung based on their image sensor product roadmap to ensure that all features are delivered to OEM vendors more quickly. At the same time, through such cooperation, Qualcomm can ensure that when OEM develops new products, the image sensor can work seamlessly with Snapdragon Mobile platform to maximize the sensor's capabilities based on Spectra ISP, without additional debugging and verification work, thus speeding up the time to market.

In addition, Qualcomm has an independent R & D team focused on imaging solutions to help OEM partners integrate the latest customized features and adjustments based on a variety of image sensors to achieve excellent image quality and create differentiated products.

The second question raised by CTOnews.com is about the world's first event-based vision sensor mentioned at the press conference. Many friends may mistakenly think that it is integrated in Spectra ISP, but in fact, it was created by Qualcomm and partner Prophesee, mainly to demonstrate the collaboration use cases of event-based image sensors and RGB sensors, and to reduce the blur of action in photos. Event-based image sensors can also be used for high-speed shooting, such as super slow motion.

At the same time, some friends may also worry that the existence of this sensor is equivalent to adding a processing step to the smartphone's image system, which will lead to the loss of image data in more processing steps.

Qualcomm said that event-based image sensors do require additional processing steps and further fusion of event-based image sensors and RGB sensors, but this fusion only applies to the specific use cases mentioned above, does not affect the overall photo quality or delay, and can even improve the quality of photos.

In addition to CTOnews.com, other media colleagues at the scene also asked some details about Snapdragon 8 Gne 2. For example, as we all know, this time Snapdragon 8 Gne 2 uses a four-cluster architecture of 1 / 2 / 2 / 3, of which two Cortex-A710 cores exist for better compatibility with 32-bit applications. Some media have noticed that the current penetration rate of 64-bit applications should be high enough, and the new small core can also run 32-bit, so why should Qualcomm sacrifice the energy efficiency of two performance cores for the support of 32-bit applications?

In this regard, Qualcomm said that they have seen the situation in China and other different market applications, and are indeed in the process of transition from 32-bit applications to 64-bit applications, but such transition and transformation have not been fully realized. There are still a certain number of applications using 32-bit, so Qualcomm believes that the configuration of this core is reasonable.

At the same time, if you only use A715, there will be a problem, that is, when running 32-bit applications, you can only run on the efficiency kernel, which will undoubtedly sacrifice the relevant performance, so Qualcomm feels that there is both A710 and A715 in the performance kernel.

And Qualcomm stressed that on the second-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, there is a very large core, four performance cores and three efficiency cores, which can greatly improve performance when running more complex multithreaded applications such as games.

With regard to this new architecture, some media also asked whether the addition of a performance core this year could significantly reduce the use of super-large cores.

In response to this issue, Qualcomm said that the super kernel of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is designed for heavy single-threaded workloads, and Qualcomm has specifically optimized it. The performance kernel is mainly for high-performance, multithreaded workloads, so if you are dealing with a multithreaded workload, you will actually use one super kernel and four performance kernels at the same time, but if it is only a single thread and requires a very high performance workload, you will mainly use the super kernel.

In addition, many friends may be more concerned about why Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 did not use TSMC's newer generation of 4nm (N4P) process, but adopted the first generation of 4nm process. Media at the scene also asked this question, and Qualcomm's answer was: "in our view, this is the best process technology at this time node, and it is the most suitable for mass production."

In addition, with regard to the hardware-level mobile light chase carried by Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, some friends may be more concerned about the impact of enabling light chase rendering on Adreno GPU?

In this regard, Qualcomm first took the demonstration of light pursuit by OEM manufacturers at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit as an example, saying that these games can still run smoothly under the frame rate of 60FPS for 30 minutes or more after opening light pursuit, with a very stable performance. At the same time, they stressed that it is important that all the optical pursuit features demonstrated at the Snapdragon Summit are implemented at a power consumption of less than 5W. Through technological innovation, Qualcomm enables everyone to achieve optical pursuit without sacrificing performance and increasing power consumption. Moreover, this is a hardware-based real-time optical tracking feature specially built for Adreno GPU, not from a third-party license, and is currently available only on the second generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform.

These are some of the questions and topics that CTOnews.com thinks are worthy of attention in this Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 interview. Of course, you may have some questions not mentioned in this interview, but I believe that with the launch of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 flagship mobile phones, the answers to many questions will also be solved. CTOnews.com will also continue to pay attention to the performance of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 after the launch, and give evaluation and interpretation. You are welcome to pay more attention to CTOnews.com.

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