If you’ve been looking at Qualcomm processors recently, it’s no secret that most of the Snapdragon 6 series processors are essentially underclocked versions of their Snapdragon 7 series equivalents. For one, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 shares a lot in common with the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 save for an underclocked CPU and GPU, and the same can be said of the newly announced Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, which is based on the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3.
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Looking into the technical specs, both chips are similar, especially with the CPU layout. The main difference is clock speeds: The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4’s Cortex-A720 prime core runs at 2.3Ghz instead of 2.5Ghz, and the Cortex-A720 performance cores run at 2.2Ghz instead of 2.4Ghz. We presume that GPU clock speeds are lower, and Qualcomm only mentioned a “29% performance increase” over the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, which was barely used by any phone brand.
Save for that difference, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 also supports LPDDR5 RAM, UFS 3.1 storage, up to 144hz refresh rate in Full HD+ resolution, up to 200-megapixel single camera (64-megapixel zero shutter lag), 4K30 HDR video recording, and Quick Charge 4+. It also gets support for on-device AI like text summarization–though Qualcomm has yet to disclose how much RAM is needed for it.
Qualcomm said that realme, OPPO, and HONOR will be among the brands that will use the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 in the coming months. If priced right, this might set up to be a good alternative to the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3.
