Possible features and abilities for the Samsung Galaxy S24 and other upcoming Android phones may have been revealed early thanks to leaked specs for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the chip thought to be powering them.
According to details published by MSPowerUser, the 8 Gen 3 chip has boosts to its performance across the board, and has gained support for new graphical and AI features. Assuming smartphone makers can leverage all the new tech that Qualcomm has added into the new Snapdragon chip, next year's Android flagships could mark a considerable leap forward.
Starting with the basics, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is built on a 4nm process. That's not quite as cutting-edge as the 3nm process that the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip uses, but still quite advanced. Its Kryo CPU runs at a frequency of 3.3GHz on its fastest "prime" core, dropping to 3.2GHz and 2.3GHz for the five performance and two efficiency cores. The Gen 3's CPU is apparently 30% faster and 20% more efficient, assumedly compared to this year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which runs at a maximum of 3.2GHz in most phones.
Next we have the "console-defying" Adreno 750 GPU, which is apparently 25% faster and 25% more efficient than the previous Snapdragon's Adreno 740 GPU. It also apparently offers ray-tracing graphics like the A17 Pro, and video upscaling to 8K for even sharper-looking games.
AI could be a big focus
Lastly, there's the Hexagon NPU which is focused on AI applications. It'll offer support for "multi-modality gen AI models," a first for smartphone chips according to the leaked material. AI performance is faster and more efficient as well, with a staggering 98% lift in performance and 40% greater efficiency, the sheet continues.
This sounds like a key part of some of the photography upgrades that the chip boasts, including a video object eraser (which at least sounds like Google's Magic Eraser tool for Pixel phones), AI photo expansion and generative AI backgrounds for video.
There's also a Qualcomm X75 modem built into the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which will apparently offer 10Gbps download speeds and 3.5Gbps upload speeds. There's support for Wi-Fi 7 too, the latest Wi-Fi standard that we've currently only seen supported on the Google Pixel 8 and the OnePlus 11.
Hopefully we will see all of these features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 announced later today as part of the Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii. Although it'll be a few months before we start seeing phones using this chip, it's looking like next year's crop of Android flagships will be worthy of spots on our best Android phones for their performance if nothing else. And if we're lucky, users of these new Androids will get a few tricks that iPhone users will wish they had access to.
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