Qualcomm finally unveiled its latest Snapdragon 8 chip, and it’s not called the Snapdragon 8s Elite. Instead, the new chip is called the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, which makes sense since it does not use Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon cores.
Still made using TSMC’s 4nm process, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4’s CPU structure consists of a Cortex-X4 prime core clocked at up to 3.2GHz, three Cortex-A720 cores at 3.0GHz, two Cortex-A720 cores at 2.8GHz, and two Cortex-A720 cores at 2.0GHz. Qualcomm claims up to 31% better CPU performance over last year’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 while consuming 39% less power.
The GPU is an Adreno 825, which Qualcomm claims a 49% improvement in GPU performance over the one used in the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. The new GPU has on-device ray tracing support and Snapdragon Elite Gaming features like Snapdragon Game Super Resolution 2.0 and Adreno Image Motion Engine 2.0. You also get an updated Hexagon NPU that delivers 44% better performance with on-device AI tasks, along with an updated 18-bit triple ISP that supports up to 320MP camera sensors and 4K60fps HDR video recording.
You get a Snapdragon X75 5G modem that has peak download speeds of 4.2Gbps–though it only supports sub-6GHz bands. The model also gets Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0. Other features include support for UFS 4.0 storage, LPDDR5X RAM, and USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectivity, along with Qualcomm’s Extended Personal Area Network (XPAN) connectivity that uses WiFi to transmit sound.
Phones from iQOO, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Meizu are expected to debut the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 later this month.
