Midrange and budget smartphones will soon feature the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and 4 Gen 1

Late last year, Qualcomm showed off the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 system-on-chip, their then-most powerful mobile processor. It also saw the debut of their new naming scheme for their mobile chips, which carried over to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 that launched earlier this year. Now, Qualcomm has announced two new processors for the midrange and entry-level devices too, the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1.

Starting off with the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, the new midrange processor is built on the 4nm process and features a Kryo CPU with four Cortex-A78 performance cores running at 2.2GHz and four Cortex-A55 efficiency cores running at 1.8GHz. This should offer a reasonable performance bump over the Snapdragon 695, which had two Cortex-A78 cores and six Cortex-A55 cores; Qualcomm claims a 40% improvement over the Snapdragon 695. Notably though, this also means that Qualcomm won’t be switching over to the newer Armv9 architecture like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, which use the newer Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 cores.

Elsewhere, the new Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 also has an unspecified Adreno GPU with support for Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0 and OpenGL 3.2 API support. It also has a hardware-accelerated H.265 and VP9 decoder, along with HDR gaming. Qualcomm says you’ll be able to play games with HDR on at over 60fps, with this new GPU providing 35% improved performance. You’ll also find a Qualcomm Hexagon AI processor that they claim offers 3x the performance of the Snapdragon 695, along with support for Fused Accelerator Architecture for better battery life.

Other features of note include a new X62 5G modem, support for WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2 and LE Audio as well as a new Qualcomm Aqstic smart speaker amplifier. The Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 should also offer improved photography performance due to its new Spectra image signal processor that’s a triple 12-bit ISP, which can support up to 108MP photo capture and computational HDR for 4K HDR at 30fps. It also now supports up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM.

As for the more entry-level Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, it too gets some major CPU updates. Qualcomm has now kitted out their budget SoC with a Kryo CPU housing two Cortex-A78 performance cores running at 2.0GHz along with six Cortex-A55 cores running at 1.8GHz. According to Qualcomm, it should offer a 15% improvement in performance compared to the older Snapdragon 480. The Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 is also now fabbed on the 6nm process by TSMC.

The Adreno GPU meanwhile has also been tweaked, with supposed gains of up to 10% in GPU performance compared to the Snapdragon 480. The Spectra triple 12-bit ISP here has also been upgraded to feature support for up to 108MP photo capture, along with up to FHD video at 60fps. There’s not much else in upgrades though, with the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 still stuck on LPDDR4X RAM and only supporting WiFi 5.

You’ll find smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 to arrive by early next year, while Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 smartphones will be available within the coming weeks. According to Qualcomm, one of the first devices to use the Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 will be the iQOO Z6 Lite, which is already scheduled to launch in India later this month. For more information on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 and Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, you can check out their product pages on the Qualcomm website.