Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 was launched on Wednesday, and Qualcomm’s successor to last year’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 delivers notable improvements in CPU, GPU, and artificial intelligence (AI) performance. Unlike the Snapdragon 8 Elite, this chip is manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process technology. It is expected to arrive on gaming focussed smartphones, and offers support for hardware accelerated ray tracing. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 also supports on-device multimodal and multilingual generative AI. The new platform provides Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 Availability Timeline
iQOO has confirmed that the upcoming iQOO Z10 Turbo will be equipped with the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip. It is also expected to arrive on upcoming smartphones from Meizu, Oppo, and Xiaomi in the coming weeks or months.
The new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chip is expected to power gaming smartphones that are more affordable than flagship handsets that are equipped with Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 Specifications
Unlike the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is produced using TSMC’s 3nm process technology, the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is a 4nm chip. The chipset has Arm reference cores, instead of Qualcomm’s custom Oryon ones. It comprises one Arm Cortex-X4 core (3.2GHz), three Cortex-A720 cores (3.0GHz), two Cortex-A720 cores (2.8GHz), and two Cortex-A720 cores (2.0GHz). The chipset supports up to 24GB LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.0 storage.
The chipmaker claims that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 delivers up to 31 percent improved CPU performance in comparison with its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. It is also equipped with a new Adreno 825 GPU, which supports on-device ray tracing support and is said to offer a 49 percent jump in GPU performance over the previous generation.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is equipped with an updated Hexagon NPU, which delivers up to 44 percent improved performance when handling on-device AI tasks, according to Qualcomm. Like last year’s chipset, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 features an 18-bit triple Spectra image signal processor, with support for up to three 36-megapixel cameras (or one 320-megapixel camera).
Smartphones equipped with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 can sport up to WQHD+ (3,840×1,600 pixels) displays with a variable refresh rate that ranges between 1Hz and 240Hz. Connectivity options on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 include 5G (Sub-6, not mmWave), 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, GPS, Glonass, BeiDou, Galileo, QZSS, and NavIC. It also supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C connectivity. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 supports Quick Charge 5, which was first introduced in 2020, and supports 100W (or faster) charging speeds.
