Daily Power: 💪 New mid-range champion

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in over a year now, but I do drink a nice green tea and wear green socks. Very festive, I know. More on St. Patrick’s Day at the end of the newsletter, but first some tech news from Qualcomm.

Qualcomm has officially announced its latest mid-range processors Snapdragon lineupthe Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen2. Following the trend of premium mid-range processors in recent years, these processors almost match last year’s premium Snapdragon 8 of the first generation In some ways.

• Qualcomm claims that you can expect up to a 50% CPU performance increase over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 processor, which puts it in the same ballpark as last year’s flagship silicon.
• More specifically, the new chip has two “main” Cortex-X2 cores clocked at 2.91GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores clocked at 2.49GHz, and four Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.8GHz.
• This is almost identical to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 CPU.
• The company also promises 13% better battery efficiency.
• If you are someone who enjoys Simulation gamesthat’s great news for you, as they are often very CPU intensive.
• In terms of the GPU, it is expected to double the performance of its predecessor, although you shouldn’t expect it to rival it. Premium Android phones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 In this regard.
• However, the company claims that the new chip offers better sustained performance, which has been a major weakness in modern processors.
• Machine learning is also seeing an exponential increase, as are its image processing capabilities.
• Some other noteworthy features are support for aptX Lossless audio, Wi-Fi 6E, and the Snapdragon X62 5G modem with 4.4Gbps download speed.
• We pressed Qualcomm about pricing, and the company said it expects phones with the new Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 2 processor to cost between $400-600.
• The chipset launches this month, with Redmi Note 12 Turbo and realme GT Neo5 SE among the phones expected to feature the new SoC.
• Now, the question you’ve all been waiting for: Where is the Snapdragon 7 Gen 2 other than the Plus? There isn’t one, at least not yet.
• Cindy Lei, Qualcomm’s chip product manager, noted that “…within the new mobile platform naming scheme, Plus represents a platform that sits at the very top of its tier or chain.”
• Silly naming conventions aside, this new mid-range processor sounds like an absolute powerhouse.

Stay tuned for more coverage early next week.

To celebrate these Irish days, I thought I’d take the opportunity to learn about the (mythical or historical) origins of St. Patrick’s Day traditions.

• First of all, Saint Patrick was a true Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland.
• He is the patron saint of Ireland, and today (17 March) is the day of his supposed death.
• The shamrock, apart from being Irish, is commonly seen on St. Patrick’s Day because it was used as a metaphor for the Holy Trinity during the conversion of pagan Ireland to Christianity.
• At least, that’s what the legend says.
• On the other hand, greenery and leprosy have nothing to do with St. Patrick and are only included in Ireland.
• Interestingly enough, the holiday was much more popular among the Irish diaspora than it was in Ireland itself, at least until the 20th century.
• So why do people celebrate and get lost? Well, Christian Lent’s restrictions on food and alcohol consumption have been lifted for the day, so people naturally benefit as much as they can.

Cheers! Slint!