It appears that the annual upgrade of Qualcomm’s flagship smartphone chip will be coming a bit earlier than usual, and that means the next generation of Android phones could hit consumers’ pockets sooner than expected as well.
As a leaked Digital Chat Station predicted back in February, it looks like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will actually arrive earlier than previous chipsets. Developed by Qualcomm “Save the date” on their site It states that the next Snapdragon Summit will take place from October 24-26. As usual, you will be in Hawaii.
The site doesn’t offer much, just saying that the event will allow people to “catch the next wave of amazing innovation.”
But with the last three generations of Snapdragon flagships arriving in November and December, this is significantly earlier than usual. That could lead to high-end Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 and OnePlus 12 coming out a bit faster, giving the iPhone 15 and its September launch a little less headroom than previous generations.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: What do we expect?
Digital Chat Station, which correctly predicted Qualcomm’s early February event, appeared again in April with a prediction about performance. The chip, according to the leaker on the Chinese social network Weiboyou’ll boast a whopping 50% improvement in GPU performance.
Since the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 already has better graphic stats than Apple’s A16 chip, this could widen the gap even further (though the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 chip is expected to be a huge leap forward as well, of course. ).
Last month, reliable leaker Ice Universe added his two cents to the mix. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will come in a “1 + 5 + 2” configuration (one primary core with the highest clock speed, five performance cores for everyday things and two efficiency cores for less demanding work), it claims. He also predicts that the performance of the Adreno 750 GPU has been “significantly improved”.
Happily, this seemingly improved performance won’t have a significant impact on battery life. “This generation will maintain the overall energy efficiency of 8Gen2 and will be superior [sic.] SOC,” he concluded.
In other words, this will likely be the chip to power a lot of the best phones of 2024, so we can’t wait to see what it can do. It appears we only have five months before we get a good idea of its capabilities, and how the next generation of Android devices will compare to the (at the time) one-month-old iPhone 15 family.
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