Qualcomm was apparently planning to debut the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 with a target frequency of 4.0GHz. With the recent release of the Apple M4, which has a high clock speed and great single-core performance, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is being redesigned.
This change to the design of the most important Android chip is said to be finished in June, and it will allegedly aim for a 4.26 GHz frequency. With this change, Qualcomm will be able to compete with Apple’s faster A18 and A18 Pro chips in iPhones. Apple’s A-series chips are basically M-series SoCs that have been scaled down.
Qualcomm is likely to show off the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in October. This will give the company a few months to finish the design and send it to its smartphone partners.
With a frequency goal of 4.26GHz, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is supposed to make single-core performance a lot better. It is also said to have a “2 + 6” CPU cluster configuration, which is expected to make multi-core performance much better.
A-series chips from Apple are based on smaller versions of M-series chips. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will also be based on the Snapdragon X Elite chip for computers, which doesn’t support the ARMv9 instructions set.
But the M4 is better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 because it supports Scalable Matrix Extension (SME). This lets it handle more complicated jobs, which is why it can get higher scores in benchmarks. It looks like the faster clock speed is meant to make up for the fact that the 8 Gen 4 doesn’t get SME.