It’s okay; don’t be angry. The death of PCs and smartphones will not happen tomorrow. Qualcomm did not openly declare its demise during the company’s annual Snapdragon Technology Summit last week in Hawaii.
However, this heralds a level of performance that will ultimately make current smartphone and PC designs obsolete.
Qualcomm’s launch of its new Snapdragon 8 platform promises the beginning of a technological revolution that should quickly make everything currently on the market obsolete.
Furthermore, the results are likely to go beyond anything we’ve seen so far, and it won’t be long before someone realizes that the two market segments will soon collide and create something new, powerful, and almost magical.
For example, if your smartphone can take better pictures than a professional SLR camera, deliver music quality that surpasses a high-end audio system, and has artificial intelligence capabilities that make existing translators and digital assistants obsolete, is it a smartphone? Or something much bigger?
Let’s talk about the new Snapdragon platform. Then, we’ll wrap up with my product of the week, a new Qualcomm-based gaming stage developed in collaboration with Razor that could change console gaming forever.
A Revolution Is Coming
Usually, if we talk about combined products such as amphibious cars, flying cars, or even seaplanes, we end up with something that makes several mistakes.
Amphibious cars were ugly and tended to sink, flying cars sucked like cars and tended to fall spectacularly, and seaplanes or amphibious planes were not competitive with ships or airplanes.
Except in certain unique situations where there was water but no water. There is space to install an airport.
The exclusion to this rule was the smartphone, which initially eclipsed pure mobile phones and MP3 players, doing both as well or better than the target devices.
We knew that this class of devices would continue to evolve since the iPhone wave that started this transition.
But year after year, the evolution has been gradual. When things advance gradually, we often miss the approaching revolution, when the technology becomes so good that purchasing one of those specific devices no longer makes sense.
Arguably, devices now on the obsolete list include the iPhone and the traditional PC.
How we benchmarked the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
On Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reference device, we ran a holistic benchmark (AnTuTu), a CPU-centric benchmark (Geekbench), a GPU-centric benchmark (GFXBench), and MLPerf benchmarks.
Each benchmark was run three times and we took the average of the three results. Qualcomm had a “UI Performance Mode” option enabled by default, which we left enabled.
In fact, trying to force benchmark apps to run on Prime cores yields slightly better results in some tests, so keep that in mind when reviewing these results. It’s also worth noting that we’ll rerun these tests once we get our hands on a commercial Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered device.
Qualcomm gave us a set of expected benchmark scores based on its testing. We are using this for reference only, and at the end of this article, a table containing the benchmark scores that Qualcomm expected from the reference device is available.
Better Camera Than an SLR PCs and Smartphones
I am a former professional photographer. Even though I haven’t practiced in decades, I know what professionals look for in a solution.
For a while, we had smartphones that were undoubtedly more portable than a dedicated camera, but mainly due to lack of space; they couldn’t come close to the quality of those because no one wants to carry around a phone with actual construction. -on camera. On the camera lens. He.
Motorola created a rear camera for its phone a few years ago, but when it added it, it became too big to use as a phone and remained a largely impressive but mainly niche offering.
We’ve had high-resolution sensors for a while, but solving the lens problem seemed too far. We also had advanced photo and video editing tools that photographers could use to get closer to SLR quality PCs and Smartphones, but they were expensive and required training to work well.
Qualcomm has announced the application of its AI engine to make these photographic improvements automatically. So, it solves the lens problem and matches or exceeds what a dedicated SLR PCs and Smartphones can do, and it does some things better, like one-click panoramic photos.
Typically, with a panorama image, you pan around the image as the phone takes a series of photos and then combines them to create a panorama.
With the Snapdragon 8 solution, users take a photo in panorama mode to get a 140-degree image.
AI Heavy PCs and Smartphones
Until now, the AI capabilities of phones were almost non-existent. With the Snapdragon 8, built-in AI has become an essential phone feature.
Not only does it dramatically improve images and videos, it can also eliminate incoming and outgoing noise and create a much brighter digital assistant than the one we have today.
AI can also be used to make digital avatars for future video conferencing products, and the phone’s sensors can be used to instrument the body and allow these avatars to appear more realistic, a critical step in our approach to working in the metaverse.
Gaming
Gaming consoles have two main problems: most are not portable and typically have an upgrade cycle of more than five years due to the segment’s razor-and-blade model.
What if you could get equivalent performance from your smartphone or a dedicated Android gaming system that’s almost as portable?
Qualcomm introduced both concepts: a smartphone capability that rivaled a gaming console and would scale at the speed of smartphones, with cheaper games that wouldn’t have to pay the hardware cost, and an initially portable platform announced for developers with Razer.
We’ll go into more detail about the gaming system later. Still, the level of performance on this first attempt was impressive visually and aurally, making me wonder if gaming consoles were about to become obsolete.
Music PCs and Smartphones
The musical demonstration using a lossless audio stream was awe-inspiring.
They connected the demo phone to a pair of $7,000 speakers, and the sound was incredible—the depth and range of sound rivals some of the best high-end.
I’ve heard audio systems before, and while I doubt any of us buy $7,000 speakers to listen to music from our phones, we purchase premium sound. Systems for our cars. This should make listening to music from our phones on these systems an even more incredible experience.
Until now, it often seemed like paying for a high-end car audio system was a waste if you listened to the typical compressed sound streams that today’s phones provide.
But with this new platform, I can’t wait to see the result when I connect high-end audio systems to my cars (yes, I still paid more and would like to get my purchase’s value).
PC Performance
When you can demonstrate the performance of a PC on a smartphone, you start to wonder if the smartphone could replace the PC with the correct set of accessories.
Lenovo showed off its head-mounted display at the event and arguably has the best portable keyboard on the market. While they haven’t announced a combined product yet, I imagine they will eventually, and in a few months.
We’ll be wondering if most people increasingly running their applications in the cloud already need both devices.
For now, Lenovo is focusing on laptops with Snapdragon processors. However, with this level of performance, one begins to wonder if we need two devices with similar presentation levels.
Conclusion
The smartphones that will use this new Snapdragon stage should begin to be announced before the end of the year, and above all, we will have to keep an eye on the Motorola version, which, from what I have heard, will be incredible.
This new generation promises a better music player, camera, gaming platform, and perfect phone.
I think this is the beginning of a revolution. Companies like Razer, Lenovo, Acer, and HP have demonstrated high creativity.
Discover the potential to revolutionize the market and use the revolution to dominate it. The change should be surprising and massive. I can barely wait.