Real-time ray tracing on a smartphone—really?

Qualcomm held their annual Hawaii tech summit again for the first time in a few years and did it with a bang. The center of the get-together was the announcement of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform. The new SoC has Qualcomm’s first implementation of its new CPU based on the Arm ISA (and, says the company emphatically, is not based on the Nuvia architecture). It also has new sound processors, built-in 5G with diversity, new DSPs for AI, and a new GPU with ray-tracing capabilities. The new SoC will be employed in high-end smartphones and Windows-based notebooks