Qualcomm has revealed the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset, which will be used in budget phones from Realme, OPPO, Honor, and other manufacturers. It includes faster CPU and GPU performance, plus a few other goodies.
The Snapdragon 6 series (previously labelled as Snapdragon 600) is one of Qualcomm’s mid-range chipsets intended for budget phones, like the Motorola Moto G85 and Samsung Galaxy A23. It’s not as common in the United States as other countries, but phones in the US with these chipsets are usually in the $300-400 price range.
Qualcomm says the new Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 mobile platform brings “remarkable performance, extended battery life, and first-in-series Gen AI support to more users worldwide.” The company is claiming an 11% improvement in CPU performance, a 29% GPU boost, and a 12% improvement in “power savings” compared to the previous Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. The older chip such a minor update that Qualcomm didn’t even announce it, and the upgraded Snapdragon 6s Gen 3 was a slightly-changed Snapdragon 695 from 2021, so the bar here is pretty low.
The new chip has an 8-core Kyro CPU (four 2.4 GHz performance cores and four 1.8 GHz efficiency cores), an Adreno GPU, a Hexagon NPU for local machine learning and AI tasks, Wi-Fi 6E, 5G mmWave and sub-6GHz, and Bluetooth 5.2. It’s built on a 4nm process, just like the previous generation. Those fancy Oryon CPU cores from the Snapdragon X and 8 Elite chips haven’t trickled down to the 6 series yet.
Qualcomm highlighted a few other improvements, like its support for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) audio, 4K display support, and wireless lossless audio with Snapdragon sound. Nothing all that exciting, but it’s always nice to see improvements to mid-range and budget hardware—you shouldn’t have to pay flagship prices for a fast and reliable phone.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset will start showing up in smartphones from OPPO, Honor, Realme, and others “in the coming months.” Those three companies don’t sell phones in the United States, and it’s not clear if we’ll see this chip in any US devices. The Samsung Galaxy A36 is expected to be released soon, but a (questionable) leak said it will use the older Gen 3.
Source: Qualcomm
