Snapdragon 8 Is Simply Too Cool for US Carriers to Consider

You know what's cool in mobile? Hopefully, the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+. Qualcomm's latest flagship chip promises notable power efficiency improvements over the existing Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, meaning less heat plus better battery life and overall performance.

Qualcomm today announced its annual midcycle refresh for its mobile chipsets, with the Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 both coming to phones later this year.

The Snapdragon 8+ is an update to the Snapdragon 8 seen in Samsung's Galaxy S22 series. It gets a 10% performance bump, but its biggest boost is up to a 30% improvement in power efficiency. Qualcomm frames that as a boost for battery life (80 more minutes of video streaming versus the existing 8 Gen 1), but it'll also help manufacturers make phones that can hold consistent performance without overheating, which has been a problem in 8 Gen 1 devices so far.

The 8+ will be accompanied by the 7 Gen 1, an update to Qualcomm's 7 Series processors, which are popular in phones mostly in Asia, in the $300-$500 range.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 boosts GPU performance by 20% over the previous 7-series chipset and allows for 200-megapixel still photo capture. It has a new X62 modem(Opens in a new window) that supports dual-active 5G SIMs, the first in a 7-series chipset. (The 8 Gen 1 also has dual-active 5G SIMs.)

The X62 supports less 5G bandwidth than the 8 Gen 1's X65 modem: four mmWave carriers as opposed to eight, and 120MHz of sub-6GHz spectrum as opposed to 300MHz. But it'll support all the new bands for AT&T and Dish, for example, which weren't in older chipsets.

This Innovation Will Be Hard to Find on US Shelves

The new Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 are mostly targeted at the vibrant mobile markets of Europe and Asia, where a dozen or more different manufacturers fight it out to release powerful phones in the $500 range.

Here in the US the situation is darker, and manufacturers move more slowly. Over the years, I've had several phone makers tell me this is because of the carrier-controlled nature of our market. In the US, carriers control the sales of almost all phones other than Apple's. They like working with a few reliable partners, and they have very expensive, time-consuming certification requirements present in few other countries.

Take a look at Qualcomm's slide of partners releasing phones with the new chipsets. Of 15 partners, only one, Motorola, has a decent chance of releasing a meaningful phone in our market on that timeframe. Asus ROG and RedMagic technically sell phones in the US, but barely, and while OnePlus sells phones in the US, I haven't heard any plans for a new US phone in Q2.

The 8+ partner list has one more potential US partner: "Asus ROG, Black Shark, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, OSOM, realme, RedMagic, Redmi, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE, with commercial devices expected to be available in Q3 2022."

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In that list, the one big green flag is OSOM(Opens in a new window), a new manufacturer with a lot of staff from Essential. The Essential PH-1 came out in the US, and OSOM's OV1 is likely to come out here as well.

In terms of other prominent phones coming to the US for the rest of the year, Google's next three Pixels will all use its own Tensor platform, and I think Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Fold 4 are far enough along in their development process that they'll use an 8 Gen 1.

That said, the Flip 4 could absolutely benefit from the 8+'s power-consumption improvements, as battery life is its biggest challenge.

The world is a big place, and Qualcomm needs to maintain its lead over competitor MediaTek in high-end Android phones. The Snapdragon 8+ and 7 Gen 1 will help it do that. It's just a pity that Americans won't get to see more of this innovation soon.