Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 unveiled: first on TSMC 4nm node, first with ARMv9 CPU cores

The brand new Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 arrives as a significant improve over its predecessor and a departure from earlier designs within the collection. It has enhancements in all the important thing areas of efficiency, effectivity, gaming, AI, digital camera and audio.

The Gen 4 chip would be the first within the collection fabbed on TSMC’s 4nm node. Earlier generations have used a 4nm node from Samsung and a 6nm one from TSMC.

This technology is the primary within the 6-series to make use of ARMv9-based CPU cores – Cortex-A720 (2.3GHz) because the prime core, three extra A720 (2.2GHz) as large cores and 4 Cortex-A520 (1.8GHz) as small cores. Earlier generations used ARMv8 designs (Cortex-A78/A55).

The efficiency uplift in comparison with the Gen 3 chip is attention-grabbing – regardless of the generational improve in CPU design, the CPU uplift is just 11% (measured in Geekbench 5.2 single-thread).

The brand new Adreno GPU brings a extra important enchancment with a 29% enhance in efficiency. Qualcomm is mum on particulars on the GPU, however that’s an excellent enhance. Additionally, the brand new chip is 12% extra environment friendly than its predecessor.

The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 is the primary within the household to assist INT4 – this can permit optimized fashions with extra parameters to slot in restricted quantities of RAM. Qualcomm is engaged on a textual content summarization AI, for instance. The corporate talked about that there might be a minimal reminiscence requirement for LLMs operating on the system, but it surely didn’t give an actual quantity.

The chipset helps as much as 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM (as much as 3,200MHz), LPDDR4X (2,133MHz) can also be an choice for cheaper designs. For storage, the chip helps UFS 3.1. Wired connectivity contains USB-C 3.1 that may drive an exterior show at as much as 4K @ 60Hz, 10-bit colours and HDR10+ are supported as nicely.

For the system itself, the 6 Gen 4 chip can drive shows as much as 1080p+ decision and at as much as 144Hz refresh charge. Cellular GPUs are taking a web page from their desktop counterparts and this Adreno helps Snapdragon Recreation Tremendous Decision (upscaling for gaming at as much as 4K) and Adreno Body Movement Engine (frame-gen that doubles the body charge whereas preserving energy consumption low).

For the digital camera, the chip options triple 12-bit ISPs with assist for sensors as much as 200MP. It may well file video at as much as 4K HDR, however the body charge restrict remains to be 30fps at that decision. HDR10 and HLG codecs are supported for video, 10-bit HEIF for pictures. There’s {hardware} acceleration for H.265 and VP9 playback (however no AV1).

The connectivity part is fairly acquainted. The 5G modem helps sub-6GHz (4×4 MIMO) and mmWave (2×2 MIMO) and downlink speeds of as much as 2.9Gbps. Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) is supported (together with the 6GHz band), as is Bluetooth 5.4 with aptX Adaptive. The GPS receiver helps triple frequency positioning (L1/L5/L2).

Realme, Oppo and Honor might be among the many first smartphone makers to launch units primarily based on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4. There isn’t any exact timing, we’ll hear extra “within the coming months”. We did hear that India might be one of many first markets to see the brand new chipset. Apparently, system makers are concentrating on a surprisingly low value vary of $100-$150.

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