At $240, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 could be 20% larger than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. One attainable cause for the value enhance is the hike within the value of the silicon wafers utilized by TSMC to provide chips utilizing its second-gen 3nm course of node (N3E). This would be the first Snapdragon 8 flagship chip produced on the 3nm node and with the wafer costs doubling from $15K to $30K, the next value would make sense.
Cowan’s BOM for the iPhone 16 Professional Max exhibits a $45 value for the A18 Professional AP. | Picture credit-innoGyan
One cause for the large discrepancy in pricing between Apple and Qualcomm is that the latter has to show round and promote the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 to a purchaser whereas pricing the chip excessive sufficient to make an honest revenue. Apple, alternatively, makes use of the chips which might be constructed by TSMC for its personal system which implies there’s one much less tier of pricing required.
As well as, Qualcomm is debuting its personal CPU cores for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 moderately than licensing Cortex CPU cores from Arm. Trying to retrieve a number of the prices to develop these cores may additionally lead to larger pricing for Qualcomm’s flagship AP this yr.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 can be unveiled by Qualcomm throughout the Snapdragon Summit which can happen in Hawaii from October 21 by way of October twenty third.
