Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 7 Gen 3

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC for midrange smartphones. The manufacturer positions the SoC between the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 and the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, with a greater focus on AI applications. Honor and vivo will be the first to use the soc.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is manufactured on 4nm and has a maximum CPU clock speed of 2.63GHz. The CPU consists of a 2.63GHz performance core, three 2.4GHz cores and four energy-efficient cores with a clock speed of 1.8GHz. The manufacturer uses its own Adreno GPU again. Qualcomm promises an increase in CPU performance of 15 percent and an improved GPU performance of 50 percent compared to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 from earlier this year has a maximum clock speed of 2.91GHz, which would be a 50 percent increase in CPU performance over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1.

Furthermore, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 contains an improved X63 5G modem with a maximum download speed of 5Gb/s via 5G, where it used to be 4.4Gb/s. The WiFi speed remains 2.9Gb/s thanks to the same Wi-Fi 6E support. In addition to these technical specifications, Qualcomm promises improvements in AI applications. For example, the company says that the neural processing unit under the name Hexagon is 60 percent faster per watt than the Gen 1.