Qualcomm is said to be charging customers more for Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but the price increase won't stop there as one of the company's executives hinted that Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be more expensive. Qualcomm seems to need some way to cover the cost of custom Oyron cores, which is the main attraction behind next year's big overhaul of the Snapdragon chip lineup.
Qualcomm's senior vice president said that the custom CPU core of Snapdragon 8Gen4 needs to pay a high price to strike a balance between power and efficiency.
Snapdragon 8Gen4 will obviously be the first choice for the 2025 flagship model. This will be the first time Qualcomm uses Oryon core in this product category. The company has already previewed these cores in Snapdragon XElite, but the latter is primarily intended for laptops rather than smartphones. Developing custom CPU cores requires companies like Qualcomm to spend millions of dollars in R&D (as well as acquiring technology), so return on investment is one of their goals.
Qualcomm Senior Vice President Chris Patrick (Chris Patrick) responded to Android Authority's question about pricing and said that custom CPU cores are not necessarily expensive, but he also mentioned that Qualcomm needs to strike a balance between cost, power consumption and performance. Unfortunately, achieving this balance will obviously lead to an increase in the price of Snapdragon 8Gen4.
The benefit of the increased cost is that Qualcomm can "pursue truly amazing levels of performance" to make the chipset released next year the fastest in the world. Even now, in Geekbench6's multi-core test results, the Snapdragon 8Gen3 has finally beaten Apple's A17Pro to become the fastest mobile SoC in the category, so if Qualcomm wants the performance of the Snapdragon 8Gen4 to be different, it has no choice but to increase the price.
Qualcomm reportedly charged its smartphone partners $160 for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. If Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 performs well, mobile phone manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi may have to start charging users more for their flagship products as their profit margins will be greatly affected.