Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, earmarked for Galaxy S25 Ultra, could be clocked at 4GHz

There are some things that we already know about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 application processor (AP) that Qualcomm will announce later this year, most likely in October. It probably will power the Galaxy S25 Ultra (which hurts my head just to think about considering that the Galaxy S24 Ultra was just released yesterday). We also know that the AP will debut Qualcomm's own CPU cores replacing Arm Holding's Cortex cores.

We also expect that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (codenamed Tongzi) will not have any low-power efficiency cores. Instead, it will sport two big high-performance "Phoenix" CPU cores and six medium-performance "Phoenix" CPU cores. And tipster Digital Chat Station took to his Weibo account (via Wccftech) to state that 4GHz speeds for the Tongzi mobile chip (Snapdragon 8 Gen 4) are no longer a dream. While the leaker didn't specify which core will be running at the 4GHz speed, it would likely be the two big high-performance Phoenix cores.

The 4GHz clock speed would compare with the peak 3.3GHz that the Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core is clocked at. The latest rumors call for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC to feature the Adreno 830 GPU. The chipset will be built by TSMC using its 3nm process node and reportedly tallied a rather impressive multi-core Geekbench 6 score of 10628. That compares with the 7249 multi-core score tallied by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Speaking of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, chipset, the component's configuration includes the aforementioned Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core (clocked at up to 3.3GHz), five Cortex-A720 Performance CPU cores (running between 3GHz-3.2GHz), and two Cortex-A520 Efficiency CPU cores (clocked at up to 2.3GHz). You can see the change coming with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 as a second high-performance core will be added and the two low-power cores will be replaced with two additional medium-performance cores.

Next year, there is speculation that Qualcomm will split production of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 between TSMC and Samsung Foundry. In 2022, Samsung Foundry's poor yields led Qualcomm to move production of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to TSMC, make some small changes, and call the TSMC-built chip the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Since then, TSMC has been solely responsible for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and most likely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.

Samsung Foundry has improved its yield so we will have to see whether in 2025 Qualcomm shares some of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 business with the world's second-largest contract foundry or keeps it all for TSMC, which is number one.