Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC could have higher clock speeds than Apple’s A17 Bionic

In a nutshell: The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a major improvement over its predecessor both in terms of performance and efficiency, and the trend is expected to continue with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm’s flagship chip for 2023 is said to ship with a Cortex-X4 prime core that should be much faster than the Coretx-X3 CPU core found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.

Qualcomm is believed to be working on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, and a new leak has seemingly revealed some of its key details. According to tipster RGcloudS, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will have a 1+4+3 CPU core configuration like the Gen 2 chip, which is in direct contrast to earlier rumors that claimed Qualcomm would shift to a 1+5+2 setup for its next-gen flagship SoC.

The tipster further claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 would feature a Cortex-X4 prime core clocked at up to 3.72GHz, which is around 15% faster than the 3.2GHz frequency of the Cortex-X3 core in the standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It is worth noting, however, that the Gen 2 chip also has a Samsung-specific variant with a higher CPU clock speed of up to 3.36GHz and increased GPU frequency of up to 719MHz.

The tipster also claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will have higher CPU clock speeds than Apple’s A17 Bionic “on paper.” However, whether that will translate to faster performance remains to be seen. Apple’s A-series processors typically score much higher on synthetic benchmarks than the Snapdragon chips.

On Geekbench, for example, the A16 Bionic in the iPhone 14 Pro notched up a single-core score of 1,874 points and a multi-core score of 5,372 points. In comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 could only manage 1,483 points in the single-core and 4,709 points in the multi-core test.

But a previous leak suggested that things could change with Qualcomm’s next-gen chip. An engineering sample of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was rumored to be faster than the A16 Bionic, so it will be interesting to see if Qualcomm will be able to turn the tables on Cupertino with the launch of its next-gen flagship later this year.