January 18, 2025 6:02 PM GMT update
Mishaal Rahman has now shed light on the intended use of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset and prospective performance losses. Reportedly, Qualcomm intends OEMs to use the SM8750-3-AB variant in foldables, presumably like the upcoming OnePlus Open 2 and summer's Galaxy Z Fold7.
For context, the Snapdragon 8 Elite SM8750-AB caused surface temperatures to hit 46.3 °C in our recent Magic7 Pro review unit. Thus, we suspect the same chipset in a 40% or 50% thinner housing would result in substantial thermal throttling.
Accordingly, Rahman adds that the loss of one performance core should reduce excess heat generation. The change is said to result in around 2% lower scores in AnTuTu but a 7% drop in Geekbench multi-core performance. True performance differences will not be apparent until the SM8750-3-AB starts shipping later this year.
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Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite to great fanfare at the end of October. However, the new flagship chipset was quickly overshadowed by ARM's decision to cancel Qualcomm's design licence and the ensuing legal battle, which has now been settled for all intents and purposes.
Now, Qualcomm has been spotted quietly rolling out a new but downgraded version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite. For context, the chipset was available until now exclusively with two Oryon Gen 2 Prime CPU cores and six Oryon Gen 2 Performance CPU cores clocked at 4.3 GHz and 3.5 GHz, respectively. For reference, Qualcomm also refers to this variant as 'SM8750-AB', which can be found in high-end devices globally like the Magic7 Pro, OnePlus 13 and RedMagic 10 Pro (curr. $749 on Amazon).
Now, Qualcomm has updated its Snapdragon 8 Elite product page to include the 'SM8750-3-AB', which drops a Performance CPU core while retaining all other features of the existing SM8750-AB. To add to the confusion, Qualcomm reports that the SM8750-3-AB achieves the same CPU performance gains over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 as the SM8750-AB despite its CPU core deficit. Unfortunately, Qualcomm has not shared any further details yet beyond its product brief, as well as the image that we embedded below.