Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 promises 30 percent faster CPU

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's Nuvia-designed Arm chip for PCs is easily the company's most exciting announcement today, but it also announced a phone chip: the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This will show up in most flagship Android devices in 2024 and promises around 30 percent performance improvements while picking from Arm's parts bin.

First up is a new "1:5:2" core arrangement. Instead of the usual one big core, three medium cores, and four small cores (for single-threaded performance, multi-core, and background processing, respectively), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has one big core, five medium cores, and two small cores. Qualcomm says the big core is a 3.3 GHz Arm Cortex X4 but didn't confirm any of the other CPU core model numbers. Those five medium cores don't all run at the same frequency, with three running at 3.2 GHz and two at 3.0 GHz. The CPU performance claims are 30 percent faster and 20 percent more efficient. The chip is built on a 4 nm process.

Qualcomm is always light on the GPU details (even though it is one of the strengths of a Qualcomm chip), and this year, the Adreno GPU doesn't even have a model number in the documentation Qualcomm sent over. It is supposed to be 25 percent faster and 25 percent more efficient, though. Qualcomm talked up the lighting capabilities of the chip for video games, with support for Unreal Engine 5 Lumen and better ray tracing.