During the annual Tech Summit, Qualcomm unveils its flagship chipset, which will also be valid for this year. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is the company’s latest and greatest top-of-the-line SoC, succeeding the previous 8 Gen 3. The smartphone OEMs will acquire their positions as soon as it launches in October 2024.
However, some misalignment happened with the recently unveiled Apple’s M4 chipset, which is responsible for it. According to the reports, the 8 Gen 4 chipsets were expected to be finalized in April. However, due to the launch of the new iPad Pro model, the company has to tweak some of the specifications and visualize its capabilities.
Undoubtedly, every company wants to compete in dominating the global market with their offerings. The recent iPad Pro models have an M4 chipset, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 isn’t equally competitive. Hence, Qualcomm upgraded some of its specifications and rebuilt the chipset.
Previously, the team shared the SoC with a frequency of approximately 4GHz. However, the recent Apple launch has forced them to make new improvements in their 8 Gen 4 chipset. The company will likely accelerate the frequency up to 4.26GHz, probably providing neck-to-neck competition to Apple’s Bionic A18 series.
The American Tech Giant claims the M4 delivers 1.5x faster CPU performance than the M2. The geekbench performance is also out. The average single-core and multi-core score of the Silicon chipset is around 3695 and 14550, respectively. If we compare it with similar different processors, the M4 is quite powerful. It is mass-produced using TSMC’s 3nm (second generation) process.
In addition, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is also based on TSMC’s 3nm second generation ‘N3E’ process. However, it will probably lack the ARMv9 architecture, significantly losing the performance. We don’t know why Qualcomm took this step because the prior generation (specifically, the 8 Gen 2 and 8 Gen 3) has it. One reason is using “Snapdragon X Elite,” which doesn’t support the respective architecture.
The upgraded targeted frequency (4.26GHz from 4GHz) will help get performance boosts, especially in single-core geekbench performance. Let’s see how it impacts real-life usage. Moreover, the processor will follow the 2 + 6 = 8 cores strategy, providing good multi-core performance.
Like Apple, Qualcomm is also expected to mass produce the chipset based on the 2nd generation process node. Additionally, the upcoming chipset will likely not have SME (Scalable Matrix Extension), providing greater efficiency in various smartphone implementation tasks.
Losing out on SME can be the possibility that Qualcomm is shifting from 4GHz to 4.26Hz frequency, which will help balance the performance. Moreover, given how well the competitors perform, let’s see how the company handles the situation. We have to wait and see until the smartphones based on 8 Gen 4 start coming in the fall of the year.
What are your thoughts on this? What do you think of how well Qualcomm has implemented the frequency jump to succeed against the competition? Let us know in the comments section below. We will update the post with the new information that is available.
