Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 specs leaked, feature custom ‘Phoenix’ core and TSMC’s 3nm technology

Qualcomm is about to launch the third generation Snapdragon 8 but now, the leak specs of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 appeared. This leak has some interesting aspects about Qualcomm’s chipset architecture and change in strategy.

Tipster DigitalChatStation shared input that Qualcomm will unveil its Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 by the end of 2024. The tipster mentioned that Qualcomm will switch over to its self-developed Nuvia CPU architecture.

In 2021, Qualcomm bought Nuvia for $1.4 billion. This was seen as a move by Qualcomm to bring in designs and expertise to create or customize Arm CPU cores to compete against Apple. It was speculated that Qualcomm could use Nuvia’s blueprints in smartphones. On the other hand, “Phoenix” could be the renamed version of Oryon, which is the custom CPU cores from Qualcomm.

It also revealed the octa-core setup, consisting of 2 performance Phoenix cores and 6 Phoenix M cores. To provide robust performance, the chip will be processed with TSMC’s 3nm technology.

According to TSMC, the 3nm technology (N3) will be another full node stride from the 5nm technology (N5). It offers the most advanced foundry technology in both PPA and transistor technology. The company promises that N3 technology will offer up to 70% logic density gain. And up to 15% speed improvement at the same power and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed as compared with N5 technology.

Currently, there’s no information available about the smartphone with this chipset. However, there is a concern that you should know. Qualcomm’s self-developed architecture needs to go through power consumption verification and compatibility.

Since Apple has a closed device ecosystem, it doesn’t need to worry about wide verification. Unlike Apple, Qualcomm is a third-party chip seller and these will be used by different phones. Thus a verification with all of the buyers would be better before release.

(source – Weibo, Via – Wccftech)