Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: A Turning Point for the Mobile Chip Industry, Coming Soon

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: A Turning Point for the Mobile Chip Industry, Coming SoonOctober, the golden season for the smartphone market, is upon us. As the National Day holiday just ended, major mobile phone manufacturers have all put new product launches on their agendas, including a number of powerful flagship models

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: A Turning Point for the Mobile Chip Industry, Coming Soon

October, the golden season for the smartphone market, is upon us. As the National Day holiday just ended, major mobile phone manufacturers have all put new product launches on their agendas, including a number of powerful flagship models. Behind this new wave of devices, there's a "fundamental factor," and it's the highly anticipated release of the newest generation of Qualcomm Snapdragon flagship mobile platforms.

The Snapdragon flagship mobile platform is a familiar name, being the standard chip for major flagship phones every year. But now, with the rapid development of generative AI on the edge, and the surging demand for intelligent lives, entertainment, and work in the era of interconnected everything, the performance, energy efficiency, and all-around innovation of mobile platform chips are facing unprecedented challenges. Against this backdrop, the performance of Qualcomm's new generation of Snapdragon flagship mobile platform chips is naturally garnering great attention.

In fact, Qualcomm has brought what might be the most significant innovations and changes in years to the upcoming new generation of Snapdragon 8 series mobile platforms. While the new platform hasn't been released yet, we can already glean a glimpse of this from Qualcomm's recent official teasers.

Self-developed Oryon CPU: Performance and Energy Efficiency Miracles, a Turning Point for the Mobile Chip Industry

On October 8th, @SnapdragonOfficial Weibo announced that the next-generation Snapdragon flagship mobile platform will feature Qualcomm's Oryon CPU, to be unveiled at the Snapdragon Summit from October 22nd to 24th in Beijing time. They also released a teaser video.

Although Qualcomm hasn't officially revealed the name for the new generation of Snapdragon flagship mobile platform, according to currently circulating reliable information, it's believed that it will be named "Snapdragon 8 Gen 3," so we'll tentatively use that name in this article.

Based on official teases, Qualcomm's self-developed Oryon CPU will be making its debut on smartphones. You're probably familiar with the Qualcomm Oryon CPU, as we've already seen its power demonstrated on the Snapdragon XElite/XPlus PC platforms released earlier by Qualcomm. This time, with the Oryon CPU being utilized in a mobile platform, it gives off a feeling of "bringing PC-level performance to smartphones," undoubtedly creating significant anticipation.

So what kind of performance gains will the Oryon CPU bring to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3? We can make some educated guesses by combining the characteristics of the Oryon CPU on the Snapdragon XElite.

On the Snapdragon XElite launched last year, the Oryon CPU adopted a 12-core, all-large-core architecture with a 3-cluster configuration. All cores ran at 3.8GHz, with two cores capable of overclocking to 4.3GHz. It also supported LPDDR5X memory, with a maximum memory bandwidth of 136GB/s and a total cache of 42MB. It is anticipated that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will follow a similar approach, featuring a full-large-core design with a massive cache, and one core cluster with an exceptionally high clock speed. Naturally, support for LPDDR5X memory is a must, and it remains to be seen what memory speed it will support.

Another aspect that impressed us with the Oryon CPU on the Snapdragon XElite was its remarkable energy efficiency despite its ultra-high performance. We believe this characteristic will carry over to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, making it one of the platform's most important highlights.

Recently, a OnePlus employee revealed on Weibo, stating that "internally, we finally ran all the energy efficiency data, and the custom version is indeed better than the standard one; it directly surpasses the A18Pro, returning to the top spot on the leaderboard." "This year's custom-designed new large core from Qualcomm is truly amazing," located at "the top left corner of the energy efficiency curve." These statements certainly align with our predictions.

In summary, we anticipate that the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will see significant increases in both performance and energy efficiency. On October 14th, Snapdragon's official Weibo account posted a teaser image that seemed to hint at this. In their teaser, they state: "They say Snapdragon makes chips for phones. Today, chips can play it even harder!" In the promotional poster, this sentence is covered by a long tube of toothpaste. It's clearly a hint that "the toothpaste is bursting out!"

Previously, Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, expressed on Weibo that "2024 will be a turning point for the chip industry. The two leading processor players in the industry have both firmly chosen 'dual ultra-large cores.'"

This is indeed the case. The benefits brought by advanced process technology in the current chip industry are increasingly approaching the physical limits. Coupled with the growing demand for AI and high-performance computing that we mentioned earlier, this is also the situation on the edge. To meet these demands, piling on cores has become the primary choice for chip manufacturers as it directly and simply increases the performance ceiling. This is why we're seeing a trend towards full-large-core architecture.

However, there's a limit to the path of piling on core count. As the core count increases, the required cache size also grows, but mobile terminal chips cannot be made arbitrarily large. So, "full-large-core" in essence is only a stopgap measure or, you could say, just "the first step."

To truly address the computing power demands, chip designers must focus on technological innovation and iteration at the level of core microarchitecture. This is precisely the most significant value of Qualcomm's self-developed Oryon architecture CPU, or, in other words, Qualcomm's advantage.

Therefore, returning to Lu Weibing's statement about a "turning point for the chip industry," it's primarily driven by innovation in CPU core architecture that will shape the new era. And the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is poised to be the answer that meets the industry's expectations.

From AI to Connectivity, Snapdragon's New Mobile Platform Delivers All-around Strength

On October 15th, Qualcomm Snapdragon's official Weibo account again released a teaser, using the same sentence structure: "They say that these small devices can't run generative AI. Today, Snapdragon will change your relationship with your phone!"

Clearly, this is hinting toward a significant upgrade in AI for the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. And I believe this major upgrade comprises two levels:

We know that the AI capabilities of Snapdragon mobile platforms primarily stem from the Qualcomm AI Engine. So, the first level should be a further upgrade in the performance and energy efficiency of the Snapdragon AI Engine, with particular attention to the capabilities of the Hexagon NPU.

The second level should be in the application of generative AI, because only innovation in functional applications can align with the teaser's statement: "Snapdragon will change your relationship with your phone."

So how can generative AI "change our relationship with our phone?" We know that Snapdragon has already successfully run generative AI large models on phones last year. The next step should be to leverage the large model's ability to comprehend multi-modal information such as text, video, and audio, truly bringing convenience to our daily work, life, and entertainment. To achieve this, the best platform would be something like an intelligent assistant. Perhaps on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, we will see improvements in its ability to handle multi-modal processing within video, audio, etc., as well as innovation related to intelligent assistants on edge devices.

Then, on October 16th, Snapdragon's official Weibo account released another teaser: "They say phones can't capture great films. Today, Snapdragon teaches phones how to capture every brilliant moment!"

Don't doubt it, this is clearly foreshadowing innovation in imaging capabilities for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Combining the poster's caption, "In 2020, the first 8K mobile documentary was shot with Snapdragon. Today, Snapdragon teaches phones how to capture every brilliant moment."

I believe this statement reveals two pieces of information:

The first message is easy to discern: This year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 should have significant upgrades in video capture capabilities.

The second message, "how to capture," is quite clever. It almost seems as if the phone's imaging capabilities have their own consciousness, capable of understanding the content we're capturing. After all, you need to "understand" before you can "capture." So, unless there's a surprise, this is hinting that AI applications should be a focus for the imaging capabili