Qualcomm will unveil its next flagship SoC for smartphones at Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii later this year. We expect the upcoming chipset, likely called Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, to bring several improvements over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 from last year. Although Qualcomm has not shared any details about the chipset so far, various leaks suggest that the upcoming chipset will go by the model number SM8550 and could feature native AV1 decoding support. In addition, a new leak now claims that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will bring significant NPU, ISP, and GPU improvements to the table.The leak in question comes from Ice Universe, and it suggests that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be based on TSMC's 4nm process. It further reveals that Qualcomm will opt for a 1+2+2+3 core arrangement, consisting of a Cortex-X3 Prime core clocked at 3.2GHz, two Cortex-A715 cores clocked at 2.8GHz, two Cortex-A710 cores clocked at 2.8GHz, and three Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 2.GHz.

In contrast, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 from last year features one Cortex-X2 core clocked at 2.99GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores clocked at 2.5GHz, and four Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.79GHz. Its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, also follows the same layout. However, all the cores on the 'Plus' variant are boosted to higher clock speeds.

Although the leak doesn't reveal the rest of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2's specifications, it claims that the SoC will bring significant NPU, ISP, and GPU improvements to the table. Sadly, it doesn't go into any detail about these improvements. We haven't seen any concrete evidence pointing toward said improvements either. But we won't have to wait too long to know for sure, as Qualcomm will reveal all details at this year's Snapdragon Summit in just over a month.