Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have been steadily narrowing the performance gap with Apple’s A-series chipsets. A new rumor claims that the next-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip will be faster than the A18 which will power the
iPhone 16.
Top flagship phones of today are already faster than an average consumer needs them to be. No one dislikes extra performance headroom though and with the increased emphasis on AI capabilities and longer software support for Android handsets, the need for speed has never been greater.
A
new rumor from South Korea (via
Notebookcheck) claims that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will beat the Apple A18 in benchmark tests.
Per the leak, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is expected to achieve a single core score of 3,500, while the A18 is unlikely to go beyond 3,300. The rumor also says that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will do better on the multi-core test and its GPU will also be faster.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 4’s new Oryon cores could give it a huge edge
Qualcomm has already confirmed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be unveiled in October. The supercharged chip will
feature Oryon cores, which will give it an edge over the
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That’s because the recent chips used cores licensed from Arm. In contrast, the Oryon cores are custom Arm cores and have been designed by Qualcomm.
Nuvia, the company that Qualcomm bought in 2021, originally started working on the cores to compete better with Apple.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is presumably also Qualcomm’s first 3nm chip. Rumors also say that the chip will only consist of Phoenix performance cores.
Qualcomm seems to be doing everything in its power to give the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 a tremendous speed boost and the latest rumor suggests it may succeed. The leak also claims that the main core will be clocked at 4.3 GHz, which is a lot higher than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s Cortex-X4 peak frequency of 3.30GHz. The higher clock speed will also increase power consumption, with the report saying it can go as high as 1.3V.
This could cause Snapdragon 8 Gen 4-powered phones to overheat and Qualcomm wouldn’t want that. Additionally, a single core score of 3,500 is too big of a jump over 2,187, which is what the
Galaxy S24 Ultra managed.
So while the use of new cores and an improved manufacturing process may help the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 beat the A18, the winning margin might not be as high as the leak suggests.
