Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chip brings Wi-Fi audio to the mid-range

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor has found itself in plenty of mid-range Android phones since its November 2023 launch date. It’s been a while since then, but we’ve finally got a successor in the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 today (May 14), and it offers a number of improvements. What’s perhaps more noteworthy, however, is that it has some major connectivity features for a mid-range processor.

This is the first Snapdragon chip outside the flagship Snapdragon 8 series to support XPAN functionality. XPAN is Qualcomm’s technology for transmitting audio over Wi-Fi networks. Compared to Bluetooth audio, this new solution enables higher-quality wireless audio and extended range. The Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro Wi-Fi edition is the first pair of wireless earbuds with XPAN support, although this functionality is restricted to the Xiaomi 15 Ultra right now.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 also brings Bluetooth 6.0 support for the first time in the Snapdragon 7 series, along with Wi-Fi 7. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Wi-Fi 7 on a Snapdragon 7 chip, but it’s certainly the cheapest Snapdragon processor with this standard.

What else does Qualcomm have up its sleeve?

Otherwise, Qualcomm says the new chipset has a 27% more powerful CPU. That’s thanks to the one Cortex-A720 core clocked at 2.8GHz, four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.4GHz, and three lightweight Cortex-A520 cores clocked at 1.8GHz.

We also see a notable graphical boost as Qualcomm claims a 30% performance boost over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. The chip also offers Qualcomm’s Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 and Adaptive Game Configuration technologies to ensure smooth gaming performance without major battery drain. In any event, these CPU and GPU gains should result in a smoother experience in more demanding Android games and emulators.

AI continues to be a major focus area for chipmakers, and the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 offers a 65% boost to NPU performance. That’s largely due to the NPU enjoying a two-fold boost in shared memory, but Qualcomm also mentions support for INT4 precision. This enables much greater quantization (effectively compression) of large language models for on-device tasks. The company also says the new processor supports Stable Diffusion 1.5 for “lightning-fast” image generation.

Don’t care about AI but love taking photos and videos? The new chip offers some improvements here, too. There’s AI-powered autofocus/auto-exposure/auto-white balance, hardware-based electronic image stabilization, “massive” multi-frame noise reduction, and real-time video super-resolution. These additions should all make for more capable camera phones on a budget.

Other notable features include a 4nm manufacturing process, peak cellular download speeds of up to 5.8Gbps, Quick Charge 5 support, and support for a 144Hz refresh rate at WQHD+ resolutions.

Qualcomm says HONOR and vivo will be the first to adopt the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip, and you can expect the first devices later this month. We hope other OEMs like Motorola, OnePlus, and Samsung use this chipset too, as it certainly looks like a very capable piece of silicon for cheaper phones.