With much anticipation and speculation, Qualcomm officially announced its mid-year refresh of its 2022 flagship processor with the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. While it still uses a 4nm process, Qualcomm finally uses TSMC’s process instead of Samsung—which should hopefully address the heating issues of previous Snapdragon 8-series processors.

Being a + version, all of the CPU cores get a clock speed boost: 3.2GHz for the Prime core, 2.75Ghz for the three Gold cores, and 2.0GHz for the four silver cores. This makes the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 the only Qualcomm processor other than the Snapdragon 870 to have a maximum Prime core clock speed of 3.2Ghz. The Adreno 730 GPU also gets a higher clock speed at 900Mhz—a 10% improvement from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1’s GPU.

Despite the performance improvements, Qualcomm claims up to 30% better power efficiency on the CPU and GPU—or roughly around 15% better overall power efficiency. Putting that into perspective, one should be able to stream video for 1.5 hours longer on the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 or do voice calls for 5.5 hours longer.

These are big claims, so it remains to be seen if they are true once the first batch of Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1-powered phones become available in the market in Q3 of 2022. While we’re waiting for the retail units, some news outlets like GSMArena got hold of a ROG Engineering device with the new processor. Initial benchmarks show a number of key improvements on the TSMC-fabbed Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, with GSMArena confirming the 10% improvement in raw performance.