A well-known tipster on X has shared some exciting details regarding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC. It’s quite surprising since we’ve barely even seen the recently released Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in action. However, the tipster’s leaks have been mostly accurate so far, so we have reason to believe the report.
According to @Tech_ReveQualcomm will once again rely solely on TSMC for making the 3nm-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset next year. Reportedly, the chip designer decided to bet on TSMC again because it plans to use custom Oryon CPU cores and doesn’t want to compromise power and efficiency with the new set of cores. You could say that Qualcomm simply isn’t convinced by Samsung’s returns or performance.
However, a dual chip sourcing strategy is still on the cards for 2025 when the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 comes out, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for Galaxy will be produced at Samsung’s foundry 3GAP, at least according to a Taiwanese news outlet.
Qualcomm’s decision makes sense, given the noticeable difference between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipsets. The former was manufactured by Samsung and had throttling issues and lower efficiency, while the Plus variant came from TSMC’s fabs and was overall a better chip.
Regarding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, the tipster suggests that it will bring impressive performance to the Android world without drawing too much power. In a multi-core scenario, the SD8 Gen 4 is said to surpass 10,000 points on Geekbench 6, while the Adreno 830 GPU offers the same level of power draw as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, while offering excellent performance improvements. The entire SoC is rumored to consume just 8W.
In any case, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is still about a year away, so we’ll likely get a lot more details about it as the actual announcement approaches.