Qualcomm’s next chip is expected to feature custom Arm cores designed by the company itself. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is likely to have a different core arrangement than last year and drop the efficiency cores. Rumors say it will have two big cores and six medium cores and it will be based on TSMC’s 3nm process.
Qualcomm previously confirmed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 would be unveiled in October and one rumor said that Xiaomi would be the first company to release a phone powered by the chip.
Though most reports have been saying that the chip will benchmark a lot higher than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, scores achieved by an engineering sample indicated that it might not be that big of a jump over its predecessor.
Chinese leaker Digital Chat Station (via Notebookcheck) has allayed those fears by saying that the engineering prototype was powered by a low-frequency version of the chip.
He claims that cores in the latest version of the chip run at between 3.6GHz and 4.0GHz. The tipster has also leaked benchmark scores for the chip.
Apparently, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 scored around 2,700 on the single-core test, and 10,000 on the multi-core test. Though that’s a huge improvement when compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-poweredGalaxy S24 Ultra‘s scores of 2,187 and 6,669, it still doesn’t completely beat the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which got single and multi-core points of 2,958 and 7,288, respectively.
This makes us doubt the rumors that said the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 would be faster than the A18 Pro chip that would power the next crop of iPhones.
That said, Qualcomm probably still has some final touches left for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, so these benchmark scores may improve in the coming months.
Digital Chat Station also says that the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 4-fueled phone, which is believed to be the Xiaomi 15, will be here in mid-October.