Ray-tracing drivers, mobile ML test devices, and marketing, oh my!
Qualcomm is hosting its annual press junket in Hawaii to announce its new flagship-tier mobile SoC — this time it’s the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 — and, as always with these sorts of events, there’s at least one invited tagalong proudly proclaiming they’ll be the first to launch a phone with that chip. This year, Oppo is playing VIP at the Snapdragon Summit and the company is doing more than just yelling “first” before leaving the room.
Of course, we can’t get around the primary payload of this announcement: the company’s follow-up to this year’s Find X5 Pro will, indeed, be “one of the first” to feature Qualcomm’s latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform. Considering that the ecosystem-wide roster of best smartphones is already a fairly small class, that doesn’t mean much on its own. It’s also an especially moot point if we recall that OSOM failed to move its Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 product in due time after bragging about its first dibs.
More importantly, though, the Chinese manufacturing giant says it played a collaborative role with Qualcomm in developing drivers for hardware-based ray tracing (a recent development in mobile that ARM pushed forward this year). Buyers of next-gen phones will see more realistic and detailed illumination, shadows, and reflections across asset-loaded games at 60fps. Compute cores will achieve that performance on 90% less workload than on previous implementations.
It also provided the chipmaker and Google a test bed for the latter’s Vertex AI Neural Architecture Search — basically, making machine-learning modeling and model implementation easier on phones, tablets, and the like. Oppo’s optimizations, the company says, have resulted in a 40% reduction in computing latency and a 27% reduction in power use when achieving an algorithmic goal.
All of these talking points — and we don’t get too much more depth on them than what we’re able to pass along — add to the nebulous sensationalism surrounding a new, top-tier Qualcomm product and serve to get Oppo’s name out there despite a lack of real exposure to hundreds of millions of potential consumers. For more insight on what’s still to come during the Snapdragon Summit, you can listen to last week’s episode of the Android Police podcast.
