The Snapdragon 8 Elite might occupy the top spot of Qualcomm’s flagship chipsets, but the company now gives its smartphone partners and, by extension, the customers an opportunity to experience top-tier performance and high-end features without paying the premium. Just a few moments have passed since the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 was officially announced, with perhaps the biggest difference being that the latest announcement does not mention the use of in-house Oryon cores, as Qualcomm has stuck with the older Kryo CPU architecture. Even then, the company advertises up to a 49 percent performance boost compared to the previous generation, along with a host of improvements, so let us dive into the details immediately.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 misses out on mmWave 5G but gets support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, UFS 4.0, LPDDR5X, and more
The first area of compromise is the use of the older 4nm lithography, which we assume is TSMC’s N4P node, meaning that on the efficiency side of things, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is inferior to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. On the plus side, the chipset sports a robust CPU cluster in the ‘1+ 3 + 2 + 2’ formation, with the fastest core operating at 3.20GHz, while the performance cores are functioning at 3.00GHz. Although the GPU name was not spilled, Qualcomm states that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 can deliver a 49 percent improvement on the graphics side of things compared to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3.
With the CPU, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is up to 31 percent faster, all the while exhibiting a power efficiency improvement of 39 percent. The new SoC also supports top-tier features such as a fast 5G modem that, sadly, does not support mmWave bands, but the sub-6GHz baseband chip that can reach maximum downlink speeds of 4.2Gbps. Additionally, the silicon gets Bluetooth 6.0 support right off the bat, along with UFS 4.0, LPDDR5X RAM functioning at 4,800MHz, and of course, Wi-Fi 7.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 also possesses on-device AI capabilities, with the SoC touting up to 44 percent better performance thanks to a new NPU. The ISP is capable enough to support a single camera sensor up to 320MP, with 8K HDR video playback at 60FPS and 4K HDR video capture at 60FPS. We expect multiple Chinese vendors to incorporate the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 into their high-end devices, and we will be back with more updates on how the new chipset performs compared to current-generation and older-generation silicon.
