Qualcomm Debuts Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 for Affordable Flagships

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 Mobile Platform, its latest system-on-a-chip for smartphones. Similar to the advancements made to Qualcomm’s top-tier chip, the 8 Gen 2, the 7+ Gen 2 focuses on refining AI performance while also making gains with the CPU and GPU speeds and power consumption. This Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 will reach phones as soon as this month.

The Snapdragon 7 Series chips are intended for affordable flagships phones, or those that are slightly less expensive than the absolute top phones. Rather than appear in devices like the Samsung Galaxy S23, it will show up in phones made by Chinese brands Realme or Redmi.

The 7+ Gen 2 features a Qualcomm Kryo CPU clocked at speeds up to 2.91GHz, which Qualcomm says delivers performance up to 50% faster than the 7 Gen 1 chip it replaces. Similarly, the sped-up Adreno GPU offers a 2x improvement to graphics performance. Together, the CPU and GPU are still able to reduce power consumption by 13% to help with battery life. In addition, the chip delivers faster AI-based processing, which helps with camera performance and other facets of mobile devices.

(Credit: Qualcomm)

For example, gaming should be better on devices with the 7+ Gen 2 on board. Qualcomm says features like Auto Variable Rate Shading (VRS) will be possible on devices with the 7+ Gen 2. While not as powerful as the Ray Tracing available to devices with the 8 Gen 2, this is still a major step up and will make things such as background graphics like fog and smoke in games look more realistic. It also brings support for Snapdragon Sound with AptX for lossless music.

The new chip should help out with mobile device cameras. It features what Qualcomm calls an 18-bit Triple ISP to improve low-light photography. It can snap 30 pictures at once and merge the best details to create a single image that has brighter, clearer details. The 7+ Gen 2 can also manage cameras with up to a 200-Megapixel sensor with HDR video capture.

On the AI front, the chip improves efficiency by 40% per watt when compared to the 7 Gen 1, and makes improvements to the Sensing Hub for recognizing context and acoustic scene detection, such as what the user is doing. It can handle upscaling, too, boosting 1080p content to 4K on supported displays.

Wrapping up, the 7+ Gen 2 includes the Snapdragon X62 Modem-RF System, which isn’t the absolute fastest connectivity platform from Qualcomm, but still ranks high in 5G with speeds up to 4.4Gbps and Wi-Fi at up to 3.6Gbps. It can support 4G/5G radios as well as dual active SIMs to help for those who need to roam with two active lines on the same phone.