Qualcomm has revealed its latest upcoming phone tech for 2025. The new Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chipset is designed to power a new wave of phones that don’t cost flagship money, but still want to deliver slick performance and AI features straight from the 8-series playbook. It’s a step-down from this year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, but still promises plenty of oomph.
Compared to last year’s Snapdragon 7-series chip, this is a big step up. The Gen 4 sees a 27% CPU boost, 30% faster graphics, and a 65% jump in AI performance. Qualcomm’s also brought over some welcome features from its top-tier chip, like Stable Diffusion image generation and on-device support for large language models. On the gaming front, it’s shaping up well too. Snapdragon Game Super Resolution is here to keep visuals sharp, and there’s a new Adaptive Performance Engine that reacts to in-game scenes in real time to balance power and performance.
Cameras also get a bump thanks to a triple 12-bit ISP. That means support for 200MP photo capture, new AI-powered auto settings, and real-time video enhancements like zoomed-in super resolution. It’s also the first Snapdragon 7-series chip with hardware-level image stabilisation for videos.
Connectivity has been beefed up too. Expect download speeds of up to 4.2Gbps on sub-6GHz 5G, plus full Wi-Fi 7 support, and new Bluetooth features like device-finding tech. Snapdragon Sound is also onboard, with XPAN wireless coverage that stretches across entire buildings and lossless music support.
This chip is set to debut in a range of mid-range smartphones coming out throughout the rest of 2025. Expect the first devices to come from Honor and Vivo, with announcements later this month.
