Within Qualcomm’s pantheon of smartphone SoCs, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 is the successor to last year’s Snapdragon 780G/778G parts. For the moment, Qualcomm is sticking with a single SKU, though last year the 780G and 778G were a few months apart – so Qualcomm may bifurcate things farther down the line.
Like its predecessors, the 7 Gen 1 follows Qualcomm’s cascading development strategy, which sees new features first pioneered in their flagship SoC successively implemented in future lower-tier chips. The big update on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was of course the switch to the Armv9 architecture and Arm’s associated CPU cores, and now Arm’s premium tier SoC is getting the same treatment.
In terms of organization, the new 7 Gen 1 is very similar to the 780G, implementing a 1+3+4 core configuration. Qualcomm is only using two core types here – the high-performance Cortex-A710 and high-efficiency Cortex-A510 – so rather than the prime core being a unique core type (Ala the Cortex-X2 on the 8G1), it’s another Cortex-A710 here. Qualcomm is clocking this core at 2.4GHz, meanwhile the remaining 3 A710s are clocked a bit lower at 2.36GHz. Finally, the A510s come clocked at 1.8GHz, the same as on the 8G1.
The shift in CPU cores also brings an update to Qualcomm’s memory controller. The 7 Gen 1 adds LPDDR5 capabilities, supporting up to the same LPDDR5-6400 data rates as the 8 Gen 1. So with a 2x16-bit channel memory bus, the 7 Gen 1 can access up to 25.6 GB per second of memory bandwidth, a 50% improvement over the LPDDR4X-capable 780G.
Unusual even for Qualcomm, the company isn’t talking about CPU performance with the new part. So absent benchmarking data, there’s little we can say here about performance expectations. The new Arm cores should allow for better performance, but there’s a lot of wiggle-room due to implementation details.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is being a bit more talkative on the GPU front, though not immensely so. Like the 8G1, Qualcomm is dropping any kind of model number for the GPU on the 7 Gen 1, so it’s simply with nothing to differentiate it from the 8G1 or previous-generation parts. Technically, we can’t even infer whether it uses Qualcomm’s new GPU architecture – though given the feature set and cascading design strategy, it’s almost certainly yes. But what Qualcomm is saying about the GPU performance of the new part is that it’s 20% faster than the Snapdragon 778G, and it’s 642L GPU. By going with the weaker SKU, this is cherry-picking by Qualcomm, but for now it at least confirms that the 7 Gen 1 will be somewhat faster than its predecessor.
Which is a good thing, too, since gaming is one of the major focuses of the 7 Gen 1. It’s gaming/GPU performance that Qualcomm leads with in their 7 Gen 1 marketing materials, and it’s no coincidence that this part is being announced at an event in China. Mobile gaming is big across the globe, but nowhere is it bigger than the Chinese market. So Qualcomm is undoubtedly expecting their OEM partners to shift a significant number of gaming-focused handsets in that busy market.
Meanwhile, since this isn’t a flagship part like the new 8+ Gen 1, Qualcomm isn’t being as aggressive on the fab front, either. The 7 Gen 1 is being produced on Samsung’s 4 nm process, the same one as the original 8 Gen 1, and which Qualcomm is intentionally supplanting with TSMC for their flagship SoC. And while Samsung’s process is clearly the lower performing option at this juncture, with lines at TSMC running out the door and around the block, it’s not surprising to see Qualcomm opt for what is a less constrained (and undoubtedly cheaper) fab for their second-tier smartphone SoC.
CPU and GPU matters aside, Qualcomm’s cascading design strategy also means a few other notable features from the 8G1 are moving down to their new 7-series SoC. That includes the newest Spectra ISP, as well as Qualcomm’s latest AI hardware and their trust management engine.
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