Massive Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 leak reveals surprising new core configuration and more

The big picture: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is expected to power almost all major flagship Android smartphones next year, and recent leaks suggest it could even get the better of Apple’s A16 Bionic that powers the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max. Not much was known about its technical specifications, however, until now.

A massive leak has revealed many critical aspects about Qualcomm’s next flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The leak comes courtesy of tipster @Tech_Reve, who claims the chip will be based on the same TSMC N4P process node as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

The tipster further says the next-gen chip will have an octa-core CPU, but with a 1+5+2 core configuration unlike its predecessor. The eight cores are expected to consist of one Cortex-X4 prime core running at 3.75GHz, five Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 3GHz and two Cortex-A520 efficiency cores ticking along at 2GHz.

In comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 comes with a 1+2+2+3 config, including one Cortex-X3 prime core at 3.2GHz, two Cortex-A715 cores at 2.8GHz, two Cortex-A710 cores at 2.8GHz and three Cortex-A510 efficiency cores at 2GHz.

Snapdragon 8gen3 rumors
TSMC N4P
1 + 5 + 2 architecture,
a Cortex-X4 mega-core 3.75GHz
five Cortex-A720 large core 3.0GHz two Cortex-A520 small core 2.0GHz than Snapdragon 8gen2 more than one performance core, less than the energy efficiency core. The GPU is Adreno750. pic.twitter.com/MTGOtnL46E

— Revegnus (@Tech_Reve) March 9, 2023

In theory, this could mean a massive bump in multi-core performance for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 when compared to its predecessor. A recent leak also seems to back up that theory, with claims that an early engineering sample of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is already faster than Apple’s A16 Bionic in Geekbench’s single-core and multi-core tests.

Even if the leak is genuine, it’s important to remember that synthetic benchmarks don’t necessarily reflect real-life performance so how the Snapdragon 3 Gen 8 will perform in real-world tasks remains to be seen.

As for the rest of the specifications, the tipster also suggests the processor will come with an integrated Adreno 750 GPU, which would be an upgrade over the Adreno 740 in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The chipset is also tipped to support UFS 4.1 storage and LPDDR5 RAM.

Finally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is expected to come with the Snapdragon X75 5G modem that Qualcomm announced last month. It is the world’s first Modem-RF System with a dedicated AI tensor accelerator, featuring Qualcomm’s 5G AI Processor Gen 2 and 5G AI Suite Gen 2.

Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 could be a huge improvement over the Gen 2 chip, but exactly how it will turn out remains to be seen.