Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 to add some 8 Elite AI features to cheaper phones
Affordable mid-range phones from realme, Oppo and Honor will launch with the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 in the coming months, according to Qualcomm
⚙️ Qualcomm’s new chipset is targeting mid-range smartphones
📱 realme, Oppo and Honor will be first to use the new 4nm 8-core chip
🧠 It’ll steal some Gen AI features from Snapdragon 8 Elite phones
🎮 4K gaming with Snapdragon Game Super Resolution offers a big upgrade
📆 Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 phones will be revealed ‘in the coming months’
We just completed our Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review and OnePlus 13 review, however, not everyone can afford these phones powered by Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. After all, their prices range from $900 to $1,299.
Good news: more Android phones will launch with the newly announced Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 chipset targeting mid-range Android handsets in 2025. So far, realme, Oppo, and Honor are already on board with the AI-touting chipset, with hardware reveals set to happen in “the coming months,” according to Qualcomm.
You can expect some hallmark features of pro smartphones – Gen AI, 4K gaming and lossless audio – to come to Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 phones, even if the benchmarks aren’t peaking like the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Expectations for the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 is an 8-core 4nm chipset with a mix of one prime, three performance, and four efficiency cores. Qualcomm says its Gen 4 chip will be an upgrade over the last-gen Snapdragon 6 with an 11% improvement in the CPU, a 29% uptick in GPU performance, and 12% more power efficiency.
How will that translate to real-world performance in 2025 mid-range phones? New handsets will be able to tout 4K graphics, for one thing. This is the first time we’ll see Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Game Super Resolution and Adreno HDR Fast Blender dynamic rendering from mid-range smartphones.
Gen AI, which supports more efficient standards like INT4, will be the first for the Snapdragon 6 series, while high-quality aptX lossless audio comes via Snapdragon Sound. The chip’s ISP supports a triple-lens rear camera of up to 200MP, although that’s up to individual smartphone manufacturers to utilize that power.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite would have been called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, but the name was changed to denote its significantly stepped-up performance. So, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 naming convention makes a lot of sense.
What’s important here is that many of the hallmark features of top phones in 2024 – like console-quality gaming and deep-learning AI – will trickle down to $500 phones in the coming months of 2025. That’s good news for consumers on a budget.
Hopefully, all of this means we’ll see new handsets at MWC 2025 in early March.
Check out the newly announced Beats Powerbeats Pro 2