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

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.

If the meaningful details on this chip feel light, that's because Qualcomm spent most of its presentation talking about AI features. The company has fully bought into the generative AI hype and wants people to locally run AI models like Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion on your tiny, battery-powered phone chip. This isn't something anyone tries to do today because AI models are really big and, therefore, work best in the cloud.

If you can find something to run locally on the "Hexagon" DSP/NPU (like maybe camera processing or a Snapchat filter), Qualcomm says it is "up to 98 percent faster and 40 percent more efficient." The company cooked up some demos of what you can do with this newfound power, like erasing an object from a video.

Qualcomm didn't give an official timeline for release, but the rumor mill has its eye on the Xiaomi 14 as the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone, which could be out as soon as November.