Qualcomm, the leading chipmaker for smartphones, has a secret project that could shake up the industry. According to a reliable source, Digital Chat Station, who correctly predicted the name of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 back in 2021, Qualcomm is working on a new chip with the codename SM8635. This chip is said to be made by TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, using its advanced 4nm technology. This is not the same as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which will use Qualcomm’s custom CPU cores and TSMC’s next-generation 3nm process, N3E.
The SM8635 chip will feature a powerful Cortex-X4 Prime CPU core and an Adreno 735 GPU, according to Digital Chat Station. He also claimed that the chip achieved an impressive AnTuTu benchmark score of over 1.7 million, surpassing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Another tech journalist, Roland Quandt, confirmed that Qualcomm has two similar chips in the pipeline. The SM7675 is expected to be the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, the top-of-the-line chip in the Snapdragon 7 series. The other one is the mysterious SM8635.
Some of the upcoming phones that will use the SM8635 chip are the Poco F6, the Redmi Note 13 Turbo, and an iQOO Neo-series phone. These phones were initially rumored to use the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, but it seems that they will get a more powerful chip instead. Some speculate that the SM8635 chip is a scaled-down version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is the flagship chip for 2024. This would place the SM8635 chip in a unique position in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon portfolio, as it would offer a balance between performance and efficiency.