The upcoming Galaxy S25 Ultra is expected to come equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor, which may be clocked at 4GHz.

We already have some information about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 application processor (AP) that Qualcomm plans to announce later this year, most likely in October. It is expected to power the Galaxy S25 Ultra, even though the Galaxy S24 Ultra was just released yesterday. Additionally, the AP will feature Qualcomm’s own CPU cores, replacing Arm Holding’s Cortex cores.

According to sources, the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (codenamed Tongzi) will not have any low-power efficiency cores. Instead, the mobile chip will have two big high-performance “Phoenix” CPU cores and six medium-performance “Phoenix” CPU cores. chip is expected to achieve 4GHz speeds. Although it is not clear which core will be running at this speed, it is likely to be the two big high-performance Phoenix cores.

It is rumored that the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC will feature a clock speed of 4GHz, which is faster than the peak clock speed of 3.3GHz of the Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core. The Adreno 830 GPU is expected to be included in the chipset, which will be built by TSMC using a 3nm process node. According to reports, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC achieved an impressive multi-core Geekbench 6 score of 10628, surpassing the 7249 multi-core score of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Regarding the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, its configuration consists of a Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core, which can reach up to 3.3GHz, five Cortex-A720 Performance CPU cores that run between 3GHz to 3.2GHz, and two Cortex-A520 Efficiency CPU cores that can reach up to 2.3GHz. In the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, a second high-performance core will be added, and the two low-power cores will be replaced with two additional medium-performance cores.

It is being speculated that Qualcomm will divide the production of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 between TSMC and Samsung Foundry next year. In 2022, due to poor yields at Samsung Foundry, Qualcomm had to shift the production of Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to TSMC with minor modifications, and named it Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Since then, TSMC has been solely responsible for the production of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it is highly likely that they will produce Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 as well.

Samsung Foundry has recently upgraded its yield production capacity. It remains to be seen whether Qualcomm will share some of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 business with Samsung Foundry in 2025 or keep it all for TSMC, which is currently the largest contract foundry in the world.