Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Sets New Standards for Battery Efficiency

New report from Ookla found that Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has the lowest 5G battery drain among flagship SoCs. The chip recorded a battery drain of 31% when connected to 5G in the Ookla SpeedTest, which is 10% less than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

Testing was conducted on various flagship smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, Google Pixel 7 Pro, and OnePlus 10 Pro. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was found to have the lowest battery drain across all the devices tested.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a significant improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in terms of battery efficiency. Gen 1 was criticized for its high power consumption, which led to shorter battery life in many smartphones. Gen 2 addressed this problem by incorporating a number of new power-saving features.

One of the main features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the new Adreno 740 GPU. The Adreno 740 GPU is more efficient than previous generation GPUs, and also supports new features that can help improve battery life. For example, the Adreno GPU can now be used to more efficiently decode video content, which can save battery life when watching videos.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also includes a new power management system that helps optimize battery usage. The power management system can dynamically adjust chip clock speeds and voltages depending on workload, which can help preserve battery life.

Leading the Market in Battery Performance

When comparing to rival SoCs, the test compared the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to other leading SoCs, incl Samsung Exynos 2100, MediaTek Dimensity 1200And Google Tensors G2. The test used a simulated network environment with a mix of sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G bands, and measured the battery life of the device running various scenarios such as web browsing, video streaming, gaming, and voice calling.

The results show that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 outperforms other SoCs in all scenarios, delivering up to 36% longer battery life than the next best competitor. Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 also achieved the highest average data throughput and lowest average power consumption across all scenarios.

Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2’s superior battery performance is thanks to its advanced technologies, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System, which supports global 5G bands and dynamic spectrum sharing; Qualcomm Kryo 780 CPU, which is based on Arm Cortex-X2 technology and offers up to 20% faster performance than its predecessor; Qualcomm Adreno 660 GPU, which supports refresh rates up to 144Hz and HDR10+; and Qualcomm AI Engine, which delivers AI performance of up to 26 TOPS.

Ookla’s test results bode well for the future of smartphone battery life. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is the first flagship SoC to offer significant improvements in battery efficiency, and it’s likely that other chip makers will follow suit in the coming years. This could result in a significant increase in smartphone battery life, which would be a welcome change for many users.