Qualcomm’s Latest Chip Is A Huge CPU And GPU Upgrade For Popular Phones
TL;DR
- Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 processor for budget phones.
- The new chip brings a more up-to-date CPU, a major GPU boost, and generative AI smarts.
- HONOR, realme, and OPPO will launch the first phones with this chipset in the “coming months.”
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 series chips power many cheap Android phones, but they don’t offer many modern features. However, the brand-new Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 brings quite a few notable upgrades to budget devices.
Starting with the CPU, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 delivers an 11% performance boost over the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. That’s nothing big on paper, but the new chip is powered by the most modern CPU we’ve seen in the Snapdragon 6 series to date. Expect an octa-core setup consisting of one Cortex-A720 clocked at 2.3GHz, three Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.2GHz, and four power-sipping Cortex-A520 cores at 1.8GHz. Either way, it beats the aging Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 used in recent Snapdragon 6 chips.
Gaming is another challenge for phones powered by these processors, but the new chip boosts GPU performance by 29%. Qualcomm is also bringing features like its Game Super Resolution feature to upscale visuals, the Adreno Frame Motion Engine for frame interpolation, and the Adreno HDR Fast Blend to improve performance in HDR games.
Qualcomm adds that the new chip brings 12% power savings over the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. That’s likely due to the more modern CPU as the chip is still built on TSMC’s 4nm process, although there’s no word on the exact process.
What about AI and multimedia support?
We’ve seen many flagship and mid-range Android chips with AI smarts, and the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 brings improvements here too. Qualcomm says the processor now has an NPU, offering generative AI capabilities and INT4 support. The latter is particularly important for running AI features on-device as it enables much greater quantization (effectively compression) of the AI models. Qualcomm adds that the chip supports on-device features like content summarization and email drafting. But we’ll need to see if phone manufacturers actually adopt these capabilities in their commercial devices.
Moving to the camera and display, you can expect 64MP single-camera support with multi-frame processing (up from 48MP), 4K/30fps HDR capture, and support for 144Hz refresh rates at FHD+ resolutions (up from 120Hz). Other notable features include Bluetooth 5.4, aptX Adaptive/Lossless/Voice, Quick Charge 4 Plus support, Wi-Fi 6E, and an unnamed Release 16 5G modem with downlink speeds of up to 2.9Gbps.
Keen to get your hands on a phone with the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4? Qualcomm says phones with the chip will be available in the “coming months” from the likes of OPPO, realme, and HONOR. We hope to see phones with this chip in the US as it would certainly make for more capable budget devices.
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