Nearly a year to the day after unveiling its predecessor, Qualcomm is ready to debut its next AI-centric mid-range processor. While we’ll have to keep on waiting for an eventual Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 unveiling, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 is here to sate your appetite for new chipsets for at least another month.
The Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 isn’t a massive leap over its predecessor, but it should keep OEMs — and consumers’ wallets — happy for another year. That said, it’s not a huge leap over the chipset it’s replacing, maintaining a 4nm process and the same 1x3x4 architecture for its Kryo CPU. While Qualcomm will presumably make the jump to utilizing its custom Oryon CPUs, it’s clearly not ready to bring that leap to mid-range chipsets just yet.
The result is a relatively slim leap in performance, with the brand promising a 7% leap in speed over the previous generation. That’s likely coming from the single 2.7GHz Cortex-A720 prime core, delivering a small boost in clock speed compared to the 2.5GHz Cortex-A720 core found in last year’s chipset. Both its three Cortex-A720 performance cores and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores are completely unchanged from last year, with each maintaining their 2.4GHz or 1.8GHz clock speed, respectively.
Qualcomm’s upgraded Adreno GPU isn’t a massive leap forward year-over-year either, delivering a similar 7% increase in performance compared to the 7s Gen 3. Really, the big change for graphics has nothing to do with horsepower, but the types of screens it supports, as the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 now includes ultra-wide displays up to 2900×1300 running at 144Hz. That might not impact most smartphones, but it could be useful for emulation devices down the line.
While older Snapdragon 7 chipsets were primarily locked to devices sold in China and Europe, the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 made a bit more of a splash in North America, thanks in part to its inclusion in the Nothing Phone (3a) series (though, that phone similarly saw a fairly limited “beta” launch here in the US). As 9to5‘s Ben Schoon found in his review, Qualcomm’s 2024 entry wasn’t quite up to snuff with what you’d expect from the brand’s flagship entries, but simultaneously, the overall package was “far from slow.”
Largely speaking, this is a pretty small bump for one of Qualcomm’s more budget-friendly chipsets; even Gen AI capabilities — usually a talking point for the brand — don’t seem particularly changed compared to last year’s release. If you’re looking forward to something more exciting, the follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 shouldn’t be too far off.
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