For years Apple’s A-series chips found in its iPhones and iPads have pretty much been miles ahead in terms of performance over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips and Smaunsg’s Exynos silicon. But that could change with the next-generation Snapdragon chip.
This is because reliable tech tipster Ice Universe tweeted that the rumored Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip will offer significantly improved processing and graphics performance, all without sacrificing efficiency.
That’s been one of Apple’s core successes with the A-series chips. So if Qualcomm can ape that and deliver the power to snap at or surpass the so-called A17 Bionic chip — we’ll expect to see in the iPhone 15 and/or iPhone 15 Pro — then the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24, which will almost certainly use the latest Snapdragon silicon, could seriously compete in terms of benchmarks and overall performance with Cupertino’s next-gen smartphones.
According to Ice Universe, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will use a “1+5+2” configuration. We take that to mean one prime core, which should have the highest clock speed, potentially five performance cores for handling tasks that need some power but not the highest clock speeds, and two efficiency cores for taking care of less demanding tasks. This is somewhat similar to the configuration of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen3: CPU: 1+5+2 frequency is unknown, GPU: Adreno 750 performance has been greatly improved. L3 cache: 10MBThis generation will maintain the overall energy efficiency of 8Gen2 and will be a Excellent SoCMay 16, 2023
No clock speeds were mentioned, but we can expect an uptick on the top 3.19GHz clock speeds of the Gen 2. But Ice Universe did say that the next-gen Snapdragon will “maintain the overall energy efficiency” of the Gen 2.
So if we get more power without any extra battery drain, the next flagship Qualcomm chip could be a winner.
Could the Galaxy S24 beat the iPhone 15 in performance?
The above question is naturally difficult to answer, given both phones exist only as rumors. But we can do some educated speculation on the information tidbits we know so far.
Apple is likely to have the advantage thanks to developing both the hardware and the software. While Samsung doesn't quite have that option, it does create its own Exynos chips, but they don’t go into every Galaxy S-series phone and often the Snapdragons beat their Exynos stablemates.
However, Apple loves to champion the power of its chips, so if a Galaxy S24 with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can challenge it, then we could see Cupertino find a way to widen the gap again. The result of this could mean more chip innovation, and thus for consumer phones that are more powerful yet also more efficient.
In real-world use, specs and benchmarks can get a little meaningless outside of contextualizing phone performance. You can rest assured that if you buy one of the best phones, be it Android or iOS, you’ll have a device that’ll easily handle multitasking and gaming for years to come. Nevertheless, more competition to breed more innovation is definitely a good thing in the smartphone arena.
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