While Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite may occupy the top spot among its flagship chipsets, the company now gives its smartphone partners and, by extension, its customers high-end performance and features at a low cost. Recently, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 was officially announced, with one of the most significant differences being that Qualcomm has continued to use the older Kryo CPU architecture instead of the integrated Oryon cores.
Regarding efficiency, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is inferior to the Snapdragon 8 Elite because it uses 4nm lithography, TSMC’s N4P node. This chipset features a robust CPU cluster in a ‘1+3+2+2’ configuration, with the fastest core operating at 3.20GHz, while the performance cores operate at 3.00GHz. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 can deliver a 49 percent improvement over the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 in terms of graphics performance.
While improving power efficiency by 39 percent, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is up to 31 percent faster than its predecessor. Additionally, the new SoC supports top-tier features like a quick 5G modem with 4.2 Gbps maximum downlink speed, although it does not support mmWave bands. In addition, the silicon comes equipped with Bluetooth 6.0, UFS 4.0, 4,800MHz LPDDR5X RAM, and Wi-Fi 7.
Featuring a new NPU, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 offers up to 44 percent better performance and on-device AI capabilities. With the ISP, a single camera sensor can be up to 320MP, with video playback at 8K HDR at 60FPS and 4K HDR video capture at 60FPS.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is expected to appear in high-end devices from multiple Chinese vendors, and we will provide further details on how it compares to older and current-generation chipsets.
