Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip for mid-range Android smartphones

Qualcomm isn't done yet with announcing new mobile processors. Today, the company revealed the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, which is its latest chip for mid-range Android smartphones and tablets.

Earlier this year, the company also launched the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, another mid-range mobile chip. However, this new Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip is meant to be a successor to the 2022 released Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, and actually has a lower-end CPU compared to the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 (we will save discussions about Qualcomm's confusing branding of its mobile chips for another day).

In any case, the new chip has four Cortex-A715 CPU cores, with one getting the clock speed of 2.63GHz and the other three clocked at 2.4GHz. It also has four Cortex-A510 CPU cores, all of which are clocked at 1.8GHz. Qualcomm says this gives the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 fifteen percent more CPU performance than the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1.

It also has an Adreno 720 GPU that is said to offer 50 percent better performance than the Adreno 710 GPU that's in the Qualcomm 7 Gen 1. The company is promoting its Hexagon NPU for AI app performance that's 60 percent better than the older chip.

Some of the other hardware specs on the new Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 include the Snapdragon X63 5G Modem-RF (radio frequency) System for up to 5Gbps download speeds on cellular phone networks. The Qualcomm Spectra ISP hardware can support smartphone cameras up to 200MP. The sound hardware supports features like LE audio and spatial audio. The company says the first smartphones with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 will go on sale later in November.

Last month at the Qualcomm Summit, the company revealed its latest high-end mobile chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It also announced the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processor for personal computers, which will be inside a number of upcoming laptops in 2024, including Microsoft's Surface devices.

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