Qualcomm will follow in the footsteps of Apple

Qualcomm took the wraps off its latest mid-cycle refresh, the high-end Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 just last month, and rumors have already started about its successor, which we presume will be known as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Most chips meant for Android phones out there have an octa-core CPU with three clusters, but it looks like the Gen 2 will have a different layout.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will have four medium cores

Leaker Digital Chat Station, who has many credible leaks under his belt, claims that SM8550 Kailua, which apparently are the model number and codename, respectively, for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, will be based on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)'s 4nm process, which was also used for the 8 Plus Gen 1.

What's more interesting though, is that the chip will deviate from the common one big Arm core, three medium cores, and four low-power cores design employed by most chip makers for their high-end chips that power the best Android phones around.

In fact, even the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 is based on that setup, featuring one Cortex-X2 core, three Cortex A710 cores, and four Cortex A510 cores. There was a time not too long ago when chips used to have four big cores and four little cores. For instance, the Snapdragon 845 had four A75-based cores and four A55-based cores.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will seemingly shake things up. Per today's leak, the chip will feature one tier with one Makalu generation core, another cluster with two Makalu generation cores, followed by two Matterhorn cores, and three Klein R1 cores

If that sounds like a word salad, Arm's Matterhorn generation refers to its 2021 Cortex CPUs, whereas Makalu is meant for 2022 phones.

That implies that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will have one Cortex-X3 core, which is yet to be announced, two Cortex-A720 cores, two 2021's A710 cores, and three older A510 cores. The tipster adds that it will come with the Adreno 740 GPU.

Qualcomm is still not ready to abandon an instruction architecture which Apple got rid of long ago

Arm announced the Matterhorn and Makalu generations in 2020 and said that they would provide up to a 30 percent performance uplift. The company had also said that starting with 2022 designs, its Cortex-A big cores would only support the 64-bit instruction set.