Qualcomm just announced its latest premium mobile chipset – the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4. The SM8735 as it is known internally is fabbed on TSMC’s N4P 4nm process node and uses older Kryo CPU instead of the Oryon core found on the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.
The CPU layer consists of 1x Cortex-X4 prime core clocked at up to 3.2GHz, 3x Cortex-A720 cores at 3.0GHz, 2x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.8GHz, and 2x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.0GHz. According to Qualcomm, the new chip is 31% faster than last year’s Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 while drawing 39% less power.
The chip also gets a new Adreno 825 GPU, which Qualcomm is advertising to offer a 49% improvement on the graphics side compared to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. You’re also getting on-device ray tracing support and Snapdragon Elite Gaming features like Snapdragon Game Super Resolution 2.0 and Adreno Image Motion Engine 2.0.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 vs 8s Gen 4 performance
The updated Qualcomm Hexagon NPU delivers 44% better performance with on-device AI tasks. Qualcomm also added an 18-bit triple image signal processor (ISP) that supports up to 320MP camera sensors and 4K60fps HDR video recording.
The new chip comes with an integrated Snapdragon X75 5G modem with peak download speeds of 4.2Gbps though it only supports sub-6GHz spectrum instead of the faster mmWave frequency bands. The chip also gets Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity.
8s Gen 4 supports UFS 4.0 storage, LPDDR5X RAM and USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectivity. It also gets Qualcomm’s Extended Personal Area Network (XPAN) connectivity which uses Wi-Fi to transmit sound and is already supported on some new wireless earbuds like the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 is expected to debut on the iQOO Z10 Turbo later this month with more devices from Xiaomi, Oppo, Meizu and others set to launch with the new chip soon.
