Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2: what Qualcomm’s AI and efficiency claims actually measure

Qualcomm announced Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 on 17 March, naming Redmi and realme as adopters and expecting commercial devices this month. That’s a platform announcement and a rollout forecast, not evidence that a particular handset is already on sale.

The company claims more than 50% higher CPU performance and twice the GPU performance against Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. Its separate system-wide power-efficiency claim is an improvement of up to 13%.

A benchmark footnote in Qualcomm’s accompanying explanation qualifies the AI claim of more than twice the performance and 40% better performance per watt against the previous generation as based on DeepLabv3 scores. It isn’t evidence that every AI application runs twice as fast, and 40% isn’t the system-wide efficiency figure.

The figures address three different questions: how a processing component performs, how efficiently an AI workload runs, and how the overall platform uses power. None alone establishes how long a finished phone lasts between charges.

The same blog says its charging results depend on device design.

Photo: © 2008 Coolcaesar, Qualcomm headquarters, 17 February 2008. Wikimedia Commons’ 1920px rendition, cropped for display. Photo adaptations: CC BY-SA 3.0. No endorsement.