Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 will blow the lower price range

While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 dominates as the company's most powerful mobile chip—it's in nearly every top Android phone right now—Qualcomm recently revealed its latest chip at the very other end of the spectrum. It is called Snapdragon 4 Gen 2.

It follows last year's Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, the first in the series to use Qualcomm's updated branding. Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 builds on its predecessor with some specs borrowed from Snapdragon's more powerful chips. At the same time, it enables the use of newer mobile technologies such as 5G.

The chip is manufactured using a 4nm process, which is smaller than its predecessor's 6nm (similar to the top-of-the-line 8 Gen 2), which promises greater power efficiency and improved performance. The two powerful cores of the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 chip operate at a frequency of 2.2 GHz (10 % more than 4 Gen 1), and we also get better 5G support and overall better network reliability thanks to the new Snapdragon X61 5G modem.

The chip has a few quirks, such as support for Bluetooth 5.1 compared to the newer 5.2 standard of its predecessor, and two 12-bit ISPs (image signal processors) instead of three on 4 Gen 1, but the functionality seems very similar in most other respects last year's chip.

QuickCharge 4 Plus support promises a battery charged up to 50 % in just 15 minutes. 4 Gen 2 is also the first in the series to include hardware-assisted Multi-Camera Temporal Filtering (MCTF) – a technology first introduced by Qualcomm in 2017 designed to improve the sharpness of moving objects in photography and reduce noise in video recording; which means better camera quality.

Qualcomm states that devices based on the new Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 chip will be available on the market in the second half of 2023 and specifically mentions the Xiaomi Redmi and vivo phone brands. The first phone with the new chip is said to be the Xiaomi Redmi 12R, which we will probably not see in Slovenia.