Qualcomm is gearing up for its annual Snapdragon Summit which is scheduled to take place in October this year. Among the many announcements, the anticipated one will be the next-gen flagship processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.
The chipset is set to be the company’s best one yet for Android smartphones, marking a big shift for their flagship SoCs. Qualcomm confirmed that the chip is being redesigned from scratch, including its fundamental architecture. So we expect to see some huge upgrades compared to the previous iterations.
The first major bump for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is its CPU structure. The new SoC is set to have Qualcomm’s self-developed Oryon CPU cores and move from Cortex. However, it’s unlikely that the current computing-focused Oryon cores will be used in mobile devices.
The chipset is expected to be built on a 3nm process which allows more transistors, resulting in better performance and power efficiency. These advancements are likely to come at a cost with smartphone makers having to pay up to 30% more for the chip, as predicted by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. This will probably mean smartphones with the chip will cost more compared to their predecessors.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will reportedly switch to a new core design featuring two high-performance Oryon cores clocked at 4.26 GHz higher than its predecessor.
As for the GPU, the Qualcomm chipset is expected to feature a new Adreno GPU with a new Slice architecture and new technology to improve “GPU utilisation”. This will deliver overall better performance for graphic-demanding tools.
According to reports, the new chipset might match Apple’s A18 bionic chip (which powers the iPhone 15 Pro) in a single-core performance and potentially surpass it in other tasks.
Early reports claim that orders have already been made for the SoC with the Xiaomi 15 series likely to be the first smartphone to feature it. Other brands like OnePlus, Redmi and iQOO are also expected to follow suit with their upcoming smartphones.
It’s also likely that we will see Samsung feature it on its next Fold and Flip lineups.
