Qualcomm to rely on TSMC for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC, promises outstanding performance

A renowned tipster on X shared some spicy details surrounding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC, which is rather odd because we've barely even seen the recently released Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in action. But the tipster's leaks so far have been mostly accurate, so we have a reason to believe the report.

According to @Tech_Reve, Qualcomm will once again rely solely on TSMC for making the 3nm-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset next year. Reportedly, the chip designer has decided to bet on TSMC once again because it's planning to use custom Oryon CPU cores and doesn't want to compromise power and efficiency with the new set of cores. You could say that Qualcomm just isn't convinced with Samsung's yields or performance.

However, a dual chip sourcing strategy is still on the cards for 2025 when the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 comes out, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for Galaxy will be produced at Samsung's foundry 3GAP. At least, according to a Taiwanese news outlet.

Qualcomm's decision does make sense, given the noticeable difference between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipsets. The former was manufactured by Samsung and had throttling issues and lower efficiency, while the Plus variant came out of TSMC's fabs and proved to be a better chip overall.

Back to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, the tipster suggests that it will bring impressive performance to the Android world without drawing too much power. In a multi-core scenario, the SD8 Gen 4 is said to surpass 10,000 points on Geekbench 6, while the Adreno 830 GPU offers the same level of power draw as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 while offering excellent performance gains. The whole SoC is rumored to consume just 8W.

In any case, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is still about a year away, so we'll probably get a lot more details about it as the actual announcement nears.

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