Qualcomm is building up to redesigning the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 to reach a higher clock speed and is expected to strongly compete with Apple’s forthcoming A-series chips.
Initially, it was finalized that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 design would be on the floor with a target frequency of 4.00 GHz and above in April this year, but unfortunately, that didn’t come true. However, jumping on Apple’s M4 and its high clock speeds helped the chipset accomplish a record-breaking single-core score.
Now the report says that Qualcomm appears to be debuting a chipset redesign with a new target frequency of 4.26 GHz. It is expected that we could see this change on Apple’s forthcoming A18 and A18 Pro phones. If the report is to be believed, Qualcomm is offering the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 a performance boost to contend with the latest chip from Apple.
The design is being pinched to hit a clock speed of 4.26 GHz and will probably be finalized in June. This should upgrade both single-core and multi-core performance for the forthcoming chip, which is expected to arrive in October.
Apple’s revealing of the M4 probably caught the San Diego brand off-guard, with @jasonwill101 posting the rumor on X, stating that the forthcoming SoC will be tweaked. Given that the M4 is mass-produced on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, most expectedly Apple could leverage this technology for the A18 and A18 Pro, giving them similar performance attributes as the newly announced 11-inch and 13-inch iPad Pro models.
On the other hand, Qualcomm is also stating that it will mass produce its Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 on the same node. However, the next smartphone chipset is expected to be based on the Snapdragon X Elite, which, noticeably, does not even support the ARMv9 instruction set. It appears that Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen might not reach its full potential because of a missing feature (SME), but a higher clock speed aims to cover up the gap.
Here’s the fact: the phone manufacturers will need to upgrade cooling systems to avert overheating.
