Qualcomm’s next flagship SoC may support AV1 video codec

San Francisco: Qualcomm’s next-generation flagship processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, will reportedly support AV1 decoding.

According to GizChina, the chip’s internal codename is SM8550, which matches the codenames of other Snapdragon 8-series chipsets. SM8450 for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, SM8350 for the Snapdragon 888, and so on.

AV1, or aAOMedia Video 1,’ is an open, royalty-free coding format designed for transmitting video over the Internet.

Qualcomm’s current chips don’t support native decoding of AV1 videos, unlike Samsung’s Exynos flagship SoCs from 2021 and 2022.

The new AV1 codec is better in terms of compression than H.265 which allows for faster streaming all while consuming less amount of data. It is more battery efficient as well.

AV1 is gaining popularity for online streaming and media consumption, only a handful of streaming services to date encode some of their content in AV1.

It is a fast-emerging codec rated to boost compression efficiency by 20 per cent and 50 per cent compared to its better-known counterparts VP9 and H.264 respectively. Therefore, it might allow playback at higher resolutions and smaller file-sizes.

YouTube streams some videos encoded in AV1 on select Android TV devices and Netflix streams select titles in AV1 if the service’s data saving mode is turned on.