Qualcomm’s next flagship SoC to support the AV1 video codec
The AV1 video codec aims to improve bandwidth efficiency on high-quality videos and has already been adopted by YouTube and Netflix. However, Qualcomm’s current chips don’t support native decoding of AV1 videos, unlike Samsung’s Exynos flagship SoCs from 2021 and 2022.
Well, Qualcomm will quickly catch up, introducing AV1 decoding in its upcoming 2023 flagship chipset. The source of this information says the SM8550 chip will be the first one to adopt it. The current Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC’s model number is SM8450, so it’s probably safe to assume that it’s the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 we are talking about here.
Samsung says that the AV1 decoding on the Exynos 2100 and Exynos 2200 allows for longer playback runtimes when streaming Netflix or YouTube content.
