After a bit of rumours and speculation online, Qualcomm has finally gone ahead and unveiled its newest expansion to its mobile chip lineup, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4. While it’s not exactly on par with the company’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm says that the 8s Gen 4 “makes premium more accessible.” We’re assuming that the chip will be used mostly with upper-midrange smartphones, but what else does it come with?
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A 4nm chip, the 8s Gen 4 packs a Kryo CPU and Adreno 825 GPU, and comes with a Cortex-X4 prime core running at 3.2GHz, which is accompanied by a trio of Cortex-A720 cores set to 3.0GHz, a pair of Cortex-A720 cores at 2.8GHz, as well as two Cortex-A720 cores running at 2.0GHz. Qualcomm claims that the 8s Gen 4 is 31% faster when compared to the 8s Gen 3, with 39% less power consumption as well.
When it comes to gaming performance, Qualcomm has designed the 8s Gen 4 to work with Snapdragon Elite Gaming features, much like a number of other higher-end Snapdragon chips. This includes real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing with global illumination for more realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections, and there’s also Qualcomm Adaptive Performance Engine for smoother and more responsive gameplay even during extended sessions. The 8s Gen 4 also supports Snapdragon Game Super Resolution 2.0, which can upscale low-resolution game scenes with 4K resolution.
As with a lot of other chips nowadays, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 also comes with new gen AI-based features. Qualcomm’s AI Engine works via a Hexagon NPU along with doubled shared memory for increased memory bandwidth and a Sensing Hub, and chip also supports INT4 and INT8 precision for more efficient AI processing.
In terms of photography and videography, the chip features Qualcomm’s Spectra AI ISP which is in charge of photo and video processing. This includes capabilities such as real-time semantic segmentation with up to 250 layers (for photo and video editing), smarter skin and sky tone correction ensures for more natural-looking colour reproduction, even in challenging lighting conditions. There’s also Night Vision 2.0 with 4K30 FPS video capture for low light scenarios in the mix as well.
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The 8s Gen 4 supports a variety of newer connectivity features which work with the AI-accelerated Snapdragon 5G Modem-RF System, which includes Wi-Fi 7 with speeds up to 5.8 Gbps and Bluetooth 6.0 technology. The chip also features Snapdragon Sound Technology Suite, Qualcomm’s Expanded Personal Area Network Technology (XPAN) for audio connectivity throughout buildings, and Snapdragon Seamless experience enables intuitive and rapid switching between compatible devices.
