More Powerful Smartphones: These Manufacturers are Upping the Mid-range Ante
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More performance for the mid-range class? The latest generation of Snagdragon 7 SoCs was designed to make gaming more fun, even in cheaper smartphones, while providing the necessary requirements for AI applications to boot.
Computer chips from US manufacturers are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain for buyers from China. However, this does not (yet) apply to Qualcomm's smartphone SoCs.
As part of the unveiling of the fourth generation of the Snapdragon 7 (Gen 4) SoC, a trio of smartphone manufacturers from the People's Republic announced their intention to use the processor in relevant models in the future. Both Honor and Vivo plan to unveil similarly equipped devices this month. Realme will also rely on the new SoC, which promises a significant leap in performance for the mid-range market.
Core Upgrade and a Slightly Faster Clock Speed
The manufacturer primarily focused on improving details. The SoC will continue to be manufactured using the 4-nanometer process. As with its predecessor, the CPU consists of a total of eight cores. The underlying principle remains the same, but minor changes have been made to the architecture where the clock frequencies have been increased.
At the top is a so-called prime core on ARM's Cortex-A720 architecture with a clock speed of up to 2.8 GHz. It is followed by an additional four Cortex-A720 cores, which are clocked slightly lower at 2.4 GHz. For less demanding tasks, three economical Cortex A520 cores are used, which have to make do with a clock speed of 1.8 GHz.
Qualcomm held back on changes to the graphics unit. According to the technical specifications, the Adreno GPU, which was also not specified, has the same capabilities as the one used in its predecessor. The manufacturer presumably remained true to the graphics unit and merely increased the clock frequency slightly so that the rendering performance, together with the faster memory, should be around 30 percent higher.
| Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 | Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 | MediaTek Dimensity 8400 | Exynos 1580 | Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prime core | 1x Cortex-A720 @ 2.8 GHz | 1x Cortex-A715 @ 2.63 GHz | 1x Cortex-A725 @ 3.25 GHz | 1x Cortex-A720 @ 2.9 GHz | 1x Cortex-X4 @ 2.6 GHz |
| Performance core | 4x Cortex-A720 @ 2.4 GHz | 3x Cortex-A715 @ 2.4 GHz | 3x Cortex-A725 @ 3 GHz | 3x Cortex A720 @ 2.6 GHz | 4x Cortex A720 @ 2.6 GHz |
| Efficiency core | 3x Cortex-A520 @ 1.84 GHz | 4x Cortex-A510 @ 1.8 GHz | 4x Cortex-A725 @ 2.1 GHz | 4x Cortex-A520 @ 1.95 GHz | 3x Cortex-A520 @ 1.9 GHz |
| RAM | LPDDR5X-8400 2x 16-bit @ 4200 MHz (33.6 GB/s) |
LPDDR5-6400 2x 16-bit @ 3200 MHz (25.6 GB/s) |
LPDDR5x-8533 4x 16-bit @ 4266 MHz (68.2 GB/s) |
LPDDR5-6400 2x 16-bit @ 3200 MHz (25.6 GB/s) |
LPDDR5x-8400 4x 16-bit @ 4200 MHz (67.2 GB/s) |
| GPU | Adreno 722 |
Adreno 720 (998 GFLOPS) |
7x ARM Mali-G720 (2329.6 GFLOPS) |
AMD RDNA 3 (1331 GFLOPS) |
Adreno 732 (1459 GFLOPS) |
| 5G modem | "Snapdragon" (4.2 Gbps) |
Snapdragon X63 (5/3.5 Gbps) |
MediaTek (5.17 Gbps) |
Exynos (5/1.28 Gbps) |
Snapdragon X63 (5/3.5 Gbps) |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 6.0 |
Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.4 |
Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.4 |
Wi-Fi 6E Bluetooth 5.4 |
Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Process node | TSMC N4P | TSMC N4P | TSMC N4P | Samsung 4LPP+ | TSMC N4P |
NPU gets More Memory
One reason for the higher graphics performance is having a faster memory connection. The RAM size remains limited to a maximum of 16 GB and continues to support LPDDR5X, LPDDR5, and LPDDR4 standards. What is new, however, is how the RAM now allows transfer rates of up to 4,200 MT/s. With the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC, data could be transferred at a maximum rate of 3,200 MT/s
The Neural Processing Unit (NPU) also benefits from such improvements: It can now access twice the amount of memory. Qualcomm does not provide further details on the optimizations but speaks of a 65% performance boost. As a result, support for AI assistants and large voice models is said to have significantly improved.
Wi-Fi 7 and XPAN improve Connectivity and Audio Quality
The Snapdragon 7's network technology has also been updated. While the integrated 5G modem has remained largely unchanged, the new SoC now supports the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard. Qualcomm's XPAN (Expanded Personal Area Network) technology was also introduced. It enables the transmission of audio data via Wi-Fi with greater range, better quality, and lower power consumption.
However, to take advantage of the advantages, the receiving device, such as headphones or speakers, must also support XPAN.
