Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon CPU cores will soon make their debut on the smartphone market. A leaked page from a datasheet reveals that there are two models on the way – SM8750 and SM8750P. The “P” presumably stands for “Performance” and might be similar to the “AC” variants we’ve seen with previous Snapdragon chips.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is built on a 3nm node (down from 4nm, should be a TSMC node again). The CPU will be in a 2+6 configuration as seen in this Geekbench test, but it’s not clear whether that’s eight Oryon cores or just two Oryon plus six Cortex cores.
Unlike the Snapdragon X chips, which target laptops, the 8 Gen 4 has to fit within the thermal and power limits of a pocketable device. Whatever the configuration, the Gen 4 chip beats the Gen 3 by 35% in single-core and by 30% in multi-core tests (and that’s just in an early Geekbench run, there might be room for improvement).
Anyway, the slide also promises a new Qualcomm Adreno 8-series GPU with improvements in performance and efficiency compared to the 7-series. Additionally, the chip will support quad-channel LPDDR5X RAM.
The “Low-Power AI” (LPAI) subsystem is interesting – it’s intended for always-on uses including audio, camera and sensor tracking. There’s going to be a beefy NPU for when the device is active, of course.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will support mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G (Rel. 17), Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be), Bluetooth 5.4 and UWB (FastConnect 7900).
Multiple brands are building flagships with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, but Xiaomi allegedly has dibs on being the first to launch a phone with the new chip. This should be the Xiaomi 15 series, which might be unveiled in October, shortly after the 8 Gen 4 chipset itself (which has been officially scheduled for an October launch).