With the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, mid-range Android smartphones will experience a serious performance boost, especially in terms of AI.
Screen size, battery life, photo quality... and now AI. For smartphone manufacturers, AI-powered features are the differentiating factor that can make a device successful. Until now, new AI features were mostly reserved for premium phones. But with its latest Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip, Qualcomm wants to make it more accessible to mid-range devices. The SoC features an NPU that's 65% more powerful in AI computing than its predecessor. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 supports assistants that run directly on the device, rather than through the cloud, for a better experience. The Stable Diffusion 1.5 model is compatible for real-time image generation in seconds. The chip also provides access to AI optimizations for the camera, such as improved autofocus and exposure.
AI, but not only
The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 is based on TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process. The CPU is 27% faster than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It is composed of eight Kryo cores, the most powerful clocked at 2.8 GHz, four others with a clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and three power-saving cores at 1.8 GHz. Qualcomm also announces a GPU 30% more powerful than the previous model. The Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 technology is responsible for managing the power delivery needed in games to maintain a smooth image when graphics demands increase.
For connectivity, the chip supports 5G sub-6 GHz, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0, the latter of which is slowly starting to arrive on our devices. On the audio side, nothing original, here we have access to Qualcomm's aptX Lossless and aptX Adaptive codecs. The Expanded Personal Area Network (XPAN) feature improves wireless audio coverage via Wi-Fi, while the Qualcomm Aqstic Hi-Fi DAC balances performance, power consumption and sound to get as close as possible to the original reproduction of the track.
In short, the mid-range smartphones of the next generation are likely to be spoiled in terms of performance and make up some of the ground lost in the premium segment.
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