The News: Qualcomm recently announced its new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 mobile platform, its upper mid-range line for the most in-demand features for a smartphone. The system on chip (SoC) will feature some of the most popular flagship features to its Snapdragon 7 Series. Read more from Qualcomm here.

Qualcomm Adds Premium Features to its Snapdragon 7 Series

Analyst Take: Qualcomm continues to innovate and capitalize on its market share in the global premium tier and mid-tier Android smartphone segments. The new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is Qualcomm’s most powerful 7 series yet, with the device continuing to bridge the gap between the mid-range and flagship device segments.

The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is getting more premium-based features that are being waterfalled down from the premium tier, along with artificial intelligence permeating throughout the SoC making experiences in gaming, sound, video and photo capture that much richer for its users. In essence, users adopting Android-based smartphones outfitted with the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 SoC should be delighted in the future by its feature richness at a lower price point.

Kryo CPU & Adreno GPU

The Kryo CPU boasts peak speeds of up to 2.9 GHz with up to 50 percent performance improvement from the prior generation. The Kryo CPU has a 1-3-4 architecture with one prime core and three performance cores, along with four efficiency cores that are excellent from a multi-tasking perspective. Looking at all of you who, like me, have twenty (or more) browser tabs and applications open concurrently at any given time — this is definitely worth getting excited about.

The Qualcomm Adreno GPU provides two times the performance improvement and provides the biggest GPU performance in the 7 series history. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is also incorporating features from the Snapdragon Elite Gaming, such as auto variable rate shading (VRS) reducing the workload for the GPU that minimizing the impact to graphical fidelity. It also includes the Adreno Frame Motion Engine where the game can run more frames running at double the frame rate without using any additional power, resulting in smoother and uncorrupted gaming scenes. Another feature is volumetric rendering that adds excellent realism to the elements in the game such as smoke, fog, and more which should delight its users even more.

From a power savings perspective, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 provides 13 percent better power savings than the prior version with all of the improvements they company has made with the SoC.

Artificial Intelligence

From an AI perspective, the integrated Qualcomm AI Engine offers two times the artificial intelligence performance improvement and over 40 percent better performance per watt than the prior generation. It also features the Qualcomm Sensing Hub with a dedicated processor, powering contextually aware use cases such as user activity recognition and acoustic scene detection.

Camera, Modem and Audio

The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 has also moved from a 14-bit triple image signal processor to an 18-bit Snapdragon Sight image signal processor offering excellent improvements in dynamic range and HDR capability. The device can capture 4,000 more times the camera data versus 14-bit triple image signal processor along with supporting up to 200 megapixel photo capture and better low-light experiences. It is also capable of supporting up to 200-megapixel shots at three gigapixels per second and 4K HDR videography.

The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 SoC also includes the Snapdragon x62 5G Modem-RF System. It is capable of peak download speeds of 4.4 Gbps with 4G/5G dual-Sim Dual Active (DSDA) allowing the user to have a foreign SIM without having to give up the local SIM. This is also an excellent option for users who buy their own devices and prefer to separate work from their personal communications. It also includes 5GmmWave-sub6 aggregation. The FastConnect 6900 mobile connectivity system allows the user to experience Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E, which should make gaming and streaming experiences much smoother for users.

From an audio perspective, smartphone users want a device where they can get an excellent audio and gaming experience whenever or wherever they are.

New to the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 SoC, includes Snapdragon Sound CD Lossless quality music with aptX allowing the user a great listening experience. Also, from a better immersive gaming experience, the SoC offers a lag-free gaming experience with in-game chat.
Wrapping it up, the newly announced Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 system-on-chip targeted at the mid-tier Android segment should resonate well as more premium-based features have been added to the mobile platform. Ultimately, its users can enjoy a more robust camera, video, sound, gaming, and collaboration experience with artificial intelligence permeating throughout each area making the experience that much more robust.

Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.