The best is getting better.
Qualcomm’s chips are found inside many Android phones, especially flagship models like the Galaxy S23 Ultra and OnePlus Open. The Snapdragon 8 series is the company’s most high-end chipset for smartphones and tablets, and now Qualcomm has revealed a new iteration coming to a smartphone near you.
Qualcomm has just announced the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is set to power a number of 2024 (and perhaps late 2023?) smartphones. The chip is rumored to show up in smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and the OnePlus 12, but until those are announced and are actually available for the public, all we have is the chip’s specs and new features. This chip features a Kryo CPU with one “prime” ARM Cortex-X4 core clocked at up to 3.3 GHz, five performance cores at up to 3.2 GHz, and two efficiency cores at up to 2.3 GHz. It’s a bit of an odd distribution, and we’ll have to see how well it works in real life.
We also get support for up to 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM and QHD+ 144Hz displays (or 4K at 60Hz). And we’re getting an Adreno GPU with support for real-time ray tracing a la Apple A17 Pro, as well as a greatly improved Spectra ISP that should provide you with an amazing experience as far as photography goes. It also has a bunch of AI-related optimizations, including an “AI Engine” that will help with on-device generative AI processing. We also have support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, UFS 4.0, and a lot more stuff. It basically improves on everything the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was already doing right, adding a few new features and, of course, vastly improved performance to the mix.
This SoC should begin showing up on smartphones over the course of the next few months. Some smartphone brands from China, such as Xiaomi, might choose to get ahead of everyone and release their 8 Gen 3 phones this year, but for the most part, you should expect to get phones powered by this SoC over the course of 2024.
Source: Qualcomm
