Qualcomm's next flagship SoC could end up powering these upcoming phones

Tipster Digital Chat Station, who back in 2021 correctly posted in advance that Qualcomm was changing how it named its Snapdragon application processors (AP) from Snapdragon 888 to Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, says that the next top-of-the-line AP will be unveiled earlier this year. The tipster says that this year, the San Diego-based fabless chip designer will hold its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii from October 24th through the 26th which is approximately three weeks earlier than last year. And the 2021 summit took place on December 2nd.

Last year, during the summit, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 which is the current flagship AP used on the OnePlus 11, Xiaomi 13 Pro, and the Motorola Edge 40 Pro to name a few. The Samsung Galaxy S23 line uses a custom overclocked version of the chipset called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy.

On his Weibo post that mentions that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be introduced in late October (presumably during the Snapdragon Summit that runs from October 24th through October 26th), Digital Chat Station mentions a few phones that will use the latest SoC which includes the Xiaomi Mi 14 series, the Vivo X100 series, the iQOO 12 series, the Redmi K70 series, the OnePlus 12 and the Realme GT5.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is expected to have a 1+5+2 configuration compared to the 1+4+3 configuration used on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The new chip should feature one Cortex-X4 prime CPU core, five Cortex-A720 performance CPU cores, and two Cortex-A520 efficiency CPU cores. The Adreno 750 GPU will be onboard. The difference between the two is that the new chip will have one less efficiency core and one additional performance core.

Interestingly, while Samsung used the Snapdragon 8 Gen for Galaxy to power all of its flagship Galaxy S23 series phones, there has been speculation that a deca-core Exynos 2400 SoC will be under the hoods of Galaxy S24 series handsets in much of the world while units shipped to the usual suspects (U.S., Canada, and China) will contain the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is expected to be built by TSMC using its N4P (4nm) process node. With wafers for 3nm production considered to be pricey at $20,000 a slice, it appears that Apple's A17 Bionic will be the only smartphone AP to be built using the new 3nm process node this year. Next year we could see TSMC and Samsung Foundry split production of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 which would be built using both foundry's enhanced 3nm process.