Qualcomm announced a new SoC for the mid-range and entry-level smartphone market. Qualcomm refreshed its long-standing 600 and 400 series chips, announcing the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 4 Gen 1. Both SoCs have received a similar spec boost, with newer and faster IP blocks such as Arm Cortex-A78-derived CPU cores and a move to newer, more modern manufacturing processes.
Following Qualcomm’s extensive cascading IP strategy, both SoC lineups in this generation have migrated to Cortex-A78 CPUs as their primary CPU cores, and on Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, the number of high-performance CPU cores has doubled. Both SoCs also feature faster Adreno GPUs, but Qualcomm hasn’t provided many details about the underlying hardware.
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It’s worth noting that Qualcomm’s 2023 mid/low-end components didn’t jump to Armv9 architecture. Unlike the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, which feature Arm’s new Armv9 core, Qualcomm’s cascading strategy means the Snapdragon 6 and 4 series will be left behind, but it won’t have much impact on users.
Like the rest of the simplified “Gen” series, this also means that Qualcomm is doing away with individual models of its Kyro/Hexagon/Adreno/Spectra modules.
Snapdragon 6 Gen 1
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 uses an unknown 4nm process (Qualcomm has not specified whether it is Samsung or TSMC), replacing the previous Snapdragon 695. Along the way, there have been some major updates to the CPU, camera, memory, and modem modules.
Qualcomm rearranged the CPU core configuration for its mid-range SoC lineup. The previous 6-series used a 2+6 configuration with two high-performance (Cortex-A7x) cores and 6 high-efficiency (Cortex-A5x) cores, while the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 converts this to a 4+4 configuration, much like what Qualcomm has already done for the Snapdragon 8 and 7 series.
Coupled with the shift in performance cores to Cortex-A78 CPU cores, the CPU performance of the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 will be much better than the previous generation, which Qualcomm says is a 40% improvement, although these cores will be (relatively) more power hungry.
On the GPU side, Qualcomm Adreno GPUs support variable-rate shading, hinting at GPU IP from a new generation of Qualcomm, with Qualcomm claiming (up to) a 35% increase in GPU performance.
The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 supports the LPDDR5 memory controller, which is the first time Qualcomm has delegated it to the 6-series chips. The maximum frequency supported here is slightly lower than Qualcomm’s high-end SoC, LPDDR5-5500, which combined with a 32-bit memory bus provides a total of 22GB/sec of memory bandwidth. This increases memory bandwidth by about 29%.
Snapdragon 4 Gen 1
Meanwhile, the entry-level Qualcomm SoC is the new Snapdragon 4 Gen 1. Unlike the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, Qualcomm didn’t update the chip extensively, but the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 still offers some modest improvements over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 480.
On the CPU side, the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 gets the same Cortex-A78 upgrade as the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, pairing the cores with Cortex-A55 cores in a 2+6 configuration. In terms of architectural improvements, this is actually a bigger step than the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, as the Snapdragon 4 series previously used Cortex-A76 cores.
Nonetheless, since the CPU frequency is still capped at 2.0GHz, all performance gains come entirely from CPU architecture improvements. Overall, Qualcomm claims a 15% increase in CPU performance.
