Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 equipped with 8+ Gen 1’s flagship features
An interesting piece of hardware!
Qualcome started their Snapdragon 7 Gen lineup in May 2022 with a great success in mid range smartphones. Now they officially announced its successor, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2. This time, it’s an interesting piece of hardware. As per the features it offers, they can make it as affordable as its predecessor and it will be a game changer in the market.
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is mainly based on the same TSMC 4nm architecture of the flagship Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This is a huge deal as we know how stable Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 performed. Mr. Lu also said that this is a frequency locked version of 8+ Gen 1. The clock speed of both CPU and GPU are locked at a point where the power consumption and performance ratio is best.
The performance improvement is unbelievable despite the frequency locking of the cores. Qualcomm claims that the GPU is now 200% powerful as compared to its predecessor. The GPU of 7 Gen 1 was Adreno 644. This is very possible as the GPU is now upgraded to Adreno 725. Just imagine that last year’s flagship snapdragon 888 and 888+ are equipped with Adreno 660 and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 have the Adreno 730. The GPU of the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is also based on the same architecture of the 8 Gen 1 Series but underclocked from 818MHz to 580MHz.
The CPU is underclocked as well. Cortex-X2, the largest core of the 8+ Gen 1 was clocked at 3.0GHz and the same X2 is now underclocked at 2.91 GHz. Other cores are in untouched condition with their max clock speed. This performance sacrifice is claimed to be done in order to make it even stable and power efficient.
Qualcomm chips are getting compititive day by day. The engeniering version of upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has already beaten the Bionic A16 in Geekbranch. Though it seems like Exynos is lagging behind but they are said to be working for a big improvement with their manufacturing process. In the meantime, Samsung announced their latest Exynos 1380.
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 also supports LPDDR5 RAM but no joy for UFS4 storage. Currently only the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 supports UFS4.0 storage so it’s not possible as the 7+ Gen 2 is based on 8+ Gen 1’s architecture.
To sum-up the whole story, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is not any new hardware but an underclocked version of the 8 Gen 1 series. There is definitely a limitation in the performance section but other aspects are basically the same. It’s been rumored that the Redmi Note 12 Turbo will feature this Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2. If that becomes true then most of the upcoming mid range phones are gonna use this SoC for its stability and performance.
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