Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 Leak Reveals A Major CPU Design Change Over Upcoming Gen 3 Chip

It is thought that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be the company's first SoC featuring the highly anticipated CPU architecture from the Nuvia team. Now, a leaker on Chinese social media has stated that these first chips will carry the SM8759 code name, and will feature a 2+6 CPU core configuration.

At the time of writing, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is Qualcomm's contemporary flagship processor, and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is only just starting to leak ahead of its expected arrival in updated flagship smartphones later in the year. However, the big hope for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is that its Nuvia designed CPU cores will elevate devices using it to another level. This isn't just going to be great for phones and tablet, but could set alight the popularity of Windows-on-Arm (WoA) devices. Up until now, WoA computers have had limited success because their battery life and 5G appeal is very much counterbalanced by lack luster performance (vs Wintel solutions). Putting things another way, the introduction of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 to Windows portables could draw parallels with the arrival of the Apple Silicon M-series chips for Macs.

Qualcomm has already informed the tech world that the custom CPU tech on the way from the Nuvia team will be called Oryon in its shipping products. For the first time, from this Chinese source, we have had a hint at the core configuration being "2+6." We assume that the mathematical equation is written to refer to a big LITTLE core configuration, as it commonly does in discussion of smartphone SoCs. In PCs, Intel has been referring to its big and small cores as P-cores (performance) and E-cores (efficiency). We didn't know for sure that Nuvia would be preparing different CPU cores to mix in an SoC, but it would be a logical assumption. It seems to be that the SM8759 will have just two of the larger performance cores, paired with six of the smaller efficiency cores.