Arm designs are shelved
As you know, Qualcomm has already announced that new Orion cores will be used in the next generation Snapdragon processors. Of course, it should be noted that Nuvia, which was purchased by the company in 2021 and includes former Apple engineers, is behind this development.
In today’s leak, it was stated that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be powered by two “Phoenix” cores (large) and six “Phoenix M” (medium) cores similar to Apple A-series processors. Therefore, Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will come up with less performance cores than previous versions. However, as a result of improvements such as LPDDR6 RAM that will increase bandwidth, it can offer significant single-core and multi-core performance.
In addition, it was claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be based on the TSMC 3nm node, but this decision is said to have changed. As you know, Apple holds the majority of TSMC 3nm shipments. Therefore, the company is likely to switch to the N3E process. In addition, the N3E process will offer Qualcomm several advantages such as better efficiency and lower cost.
It has not yet been announced which manufacturers or phones will use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. However, previous leaks suggest that the platform achieves a higher multi-core score than the Apple M2. Therefore, it seems likely that manufacturers such as Samsung will test the platform.