The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is still fresh out of the oven and we are already seeing news of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The rumor is sourced from a Weibo tipster that has shared details on 2022’s upcoming smartphone chipsets.
The Chinese tipster talks about next year’s timeline for chips and how it may be accelerated due to MediaTek’s progress in the field. MediaTek has lagged behind bigger chipmakers in the past, but now it has caught up with its latest Dimensity 9000 and 7000 chips, which are just as powerful as Qualcomm and Apple’s offerings.
This means that we may get to see the next big Qualcomm chip earlier than usual. As per the Chinese tipster, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 may go into mass production as early as April next year. It will then be released in May and June.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is based on Samsung’s 4nm process, but Qualcomm will shift the Gen 2 chip to TSMC’s 4nm node. This will make Qualcomm the second-biggest customer to TSMC, third will be AMD and MediaTek fourth.
The leak says that Qualcomm is fast-tracking the Gen 2 chip in order to outperform Dimenisty 9000, and it might be able to do it too. Though it is also possible that it was just the batch of Gen 1 chips that were shifted to TSMC amid the global chip crisis.