Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: Flagship SoC makes Geekbench debut alongside Samsung Galaxy S24+

Over the past few months, multiple rumours about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's core configuration showed up. One stated it would feature a tri-cluster CPU with a 1+5+2 layout, while another bifurcated the five middle cores further to 3+2. The flagship SoC has finally made its Geekbench debut, which confirms its unique architecture.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 showed up on the benchmarking platform alongside the Samsung Galaxy S24+ (codenamed Samsung SM-S926U), with 8 GB of RAM and running Android 14. It scores 2,231 points in the Geekbench 6.1 single-core benchmark and 6,661 in multi core. Against its immediate predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the single-core gains stand at ~10% and multi-core at ~20%, which is respectable. Unfortunately, it still falls flat against the Apple A16 Bionic, effectively disproving earlier claims about its performance uplift.

Then again, one can't expect much of a gain, given the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 only gets a marginal node upgrade (TSMC N4 to N4P). Furthermore, the sample in question is pre-production and might not perform to spec. However, it is unclear if the SoC in question is the standard Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, something that can only be answered once more Geekbench listings of the AP show up.

Apart from upping the number of performance cores to five, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also features higher clocks across the board with two Cortex-A520 cores clocked at 2.27 GHz, two Cortex-A720 cores at 2.95 GHz, three Cortex-A720 cores at 3.15 GHz and the prime Cortex-X4 core 3.3 GHz (and not 3.7 GHz as predicted earlier). Unfortunately, little is known about its Adreno 750 GPU other than its name other than the fact that it will surpass the Adreno 740 by as much as 50%.

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