It’s the perfect time to spice up the industry with some kind of news on the timeline. Many of the major manufacturers have essentially wrapped up their hardware announcements for the year, and things won’t really pick up for another couple of months. The big news is, of course, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. This is the chip that will power the majority of your flagship Android devices next year — at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 likely starts shipping sometime in mid-2023 . It’s probably no surprise to those who’ve been following the space for the past few years that Qualcomm is placing AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system-on-a-chip. With the new Hexagon Processor (that’s a Qualcomm trademark) at its heart, the new system-on-a-chip promises gains of up to 4.35x for things like natural language processing. “This is thanks to the industry’s unique Micro Tile Inferencing technique, so we can power features like real-time translation in multiple languages,” the company writes. “In other words, you can talk to a language translator and it will be translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.” Computational photography is the other big piece there. The system can recognize and segment different aspects of an image before taking the photo. He uses a portrait as an example — he separates the hair, clothes, background and a face into different sections. It’s a feature that will undoubtedly be present in imaging products such as Portrait mode, in which depth detection is important. The first Gen 2 devices are due to arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone makers signed up for the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE. Image credits: Qualcomm Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1. The component is designed to power a new generation of thin AR wearables. It is a low consumption solution that is placed in different parts of the glasses to better distribute its weight. “We built the Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of enterprise AR and deliver industry-leading processing, artificial intelligence and connectivity that can fit into an elegant form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a statement. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, the Snapdragon AR2 represents another metacomplex-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR eyewear.” The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi.
