Qualcomm just announced its new Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 upper mid-range chipset. And no you didn't miss them - there were no Snapdragon 7+ Gen 1 and no Snapdragon 7 Gen 2. The original Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 only made it to a handful of devices too, but hopefully things will change now.
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 promises substantial performance and power efficiency improvements. The main Kryo CPU core is clocked at 2.91GHz and the whole 1+3+4 CPU package delivers over 50% jump in performance compared to the SD7 Gen 1.
An unnamed Adreno GPU, on the other hand, boasts a 2x performance increase. Efficiency gains are a bit more modest - 13% in various scenarios.
As is usually the case with Qualcomm announcements, there are no detailed specs of the CPU or the GPU package. The good news is that devices running the silicon will arrive as early as this month so we won't have to wait much longer to find them out.
Other platform features include Auto Variable Rate Shading that renders foreground gaming scenes in high resolution and leaves the background in low resolution to save on power and resources. The Volumetric Rendering is also on board, which debuted with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 platform.
The ISP also gets a boost. It's upgraded to 18-bit Triple ISP for improved low-light photography by stacking 30 images into one. 200MP sensors are also supported, as well as HDR video capture with triple exposure from two cameras simultaneously.
When it comes to AI, Qualcomm's AI Engine offers 2x improved performance and 40% battery savings per watt.
For connectivity, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 uses the Snapdragon X62 5G Modem-RF System with up to 4.4 Gbps download. More importantly, though, phones running on the 7 series will finally be able to utilize the 4G/5G Dual-Sim Dual Active (DSDA) feature.
