Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip offers hardware-accelerated ray tracing

Qualcomm has announced its latest flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Along with making it more powerful and efficient than Gen 1 chips, Qualcomm says it has packed more AI smarts into the new platform. The Snapdragon 8 will tap into the latest Qualcomm AI Engine and upgraded Hexagon processor to offer "faster natural language processing with multi-language translation and advanced AI camera features," the company claims. The processor has architectural upgrades that will enable up to 4.35 times the AI performance of Gen 1 chips, according to Qualcomm. There will be support for an AI precision format called Int4, which the company suggests will lead to a 60 percent performance/watt improvement over the previous-gen chipset for sustained AI inferencing. Meanwhile, the Sensing Hub will have dual AI processors, which can support features such as custom wake words.