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After a 2021/2022 product cycle that was a bit more interesting than Qualcomm perhaps would have liked, 2023 has been a far more straightforward year for the prolific SoC and cellular modem vendor. After releasing the first of their Gen 2 family of parts earlier this year with the flagship-class Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the company is preparing to iterate through the next step of its product stack with the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2. Aimed at what’s become Qualcomm’s traditional $400 to $600 “premium” market segment, which focuses on flagship-level features with more modest performance and costs, for the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, Qualcomm is aiming to deliver a sizable performance boost to the platform.
Positioned as the successor to last year’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, this year’s iteration of the Snapdragon 7 is, broadly speaking, more focused on improving performance than adding features. Whereas last year’s Gen 1 part added mmWave support and new CPU and GPU architectures – particularly Armv9 architecture CPU cores – this year there’s only a handful of new features. In place of that, however is what Qualcomm is touting as one of their biggest performance boosts ever for the Snapdragon 7 family. This is being enabled in large part by a much-welcomed pivot from Samsung’s beleaguered 4nm process to TSMC’s 4nm process, mirroring the switch Qualcomm made last year for the well-received mid-cycle Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 part.
Also new this year, Qualcomm is dropping hints that this will not be the only Snapdragon 7 Gen 2 part we see this year, vis-a-vie the decision to launch their first Gen 2 part as the 7+ rather than the 7. In a nutshell, launching as a Snapdragon 7+ part leaves Qualcomm room to launch a vanilla Snapdragon 7 part later on. To be sure, Qualcomm isn’t explicitly announcing any such part now, but there’s little reason to launch a 7+ first unless they had plans for something below it; otherwise they could have launched it as 7 part ala the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, which was always a one-chip stack.
In terms of CPU organization, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 retains the same 1+3+4 CPU core configuration that we’ve seen for the past few generations of the Snapdragon 7 family. The big news here is that the top-performing Prime core is getting a significant performance improvement, as Qualcomm makes the switch from using a slightly higher clocked mid-core to using a more performant CPU architecture altogether.
So, for the first time ever for a Snapdragon 7 part, Qualcomm is tapping one of Arm’s Cortex-X cores for the Prime core. The Cortex-X2 used here is technically Arm’s previous-generation design, so it won’t be stepping on the toes of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and its Cortex-X3 core.
