Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the next evolution of its premium tier mobile platform.

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 sits slightly above the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 which was announced in December 2022, and now uses TSMC fabrication rather than Samsung.

The new version of the hardware that will be powering devices from Q3 2022 sees the CPU bumped to 3.2GHz, giving a 10 per cent faster clock speed, while the GPU also gets a 10 per cent clock speed increase.

There's a 15 per cent overall power saving across the SoC (system on chip), and a 20 per cent boost in AI power.

The power savings equate to about another hour of gaming, or 80 minutes of video streaming for a typical device.

So this is an incremental update on the existing hardware that we've already seen in 2022, while still delivering on all those core Qualcomm experiences - like Snapdragon Sound, 10Gbps 5G speeds from the X65 modem and integrated security.

The platform now supports up to 8K HDR video capture, essentially giving device manufacturers the freedom to create new devices and experiences based around the Snapdragon power.

Watchers of the smartphone market won't be surprised by this announcement, as it's been rumoured to be used in a number of devices already. We've seen mention of its potential use in the Sony Xperia 5 IV, the Xiaomi 12 Ultra, Moto Edge 30 Ultra amongst others.

Indeed, Qualcomm confirmed to us that there was interest from a wide range of manufacturers, including Asus ROG, Black Shark, Honor, iQOO, Lenovo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, RedMagic, Redmi, Vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.

While the progress is great, it does present something of a dilemma for customers - do you wait for newer devices or commit now?