Qualcomm’s name is closely attached to the top Android hardware of today with its mobile systems-on-chips powering devices from Asus to Xiaomi and OnePlus to Nothing. It’s been a busy year so far with a lot of premium action centered around the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, including a special edition made just for Samsung’s Galaxy devices. But it seems like the company is already gearing up for a next-gen release as a new leak spills blueprints for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Also known as the SM8650, sources say the chip is set to arrive later this year with significant improvements on Gen 2, according researcher Kuba Wojciechowski.
The eight-core Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will supposedly use derivatives of new, unannounced Arm core designs and, more notably, shift the configuration of the performance clusters.
Two Cortex-A500 series cores from Arm’s new Hayes series will be used in the 8 Gen 3, one less than on the 8 Gen 2 — these will presumably be labeled as “Kryo Silver” cores under Qualcomm’s regime. A mid-pack performance cluster gets the missing core with a total of five Hunter A700-series cores — three of them will be “Gold” while two of them will be “Titanium,” the first such instance of this compute core tier in a Qualcomm product. A top-tier Hunter ELP X-series core (“Gold+” in Snapdragon speak) rounds out the package.
While Wojciechowski admits to not knowing what this titanium core brings to the table, he said it could possibly be adjusted with a higher clock speed.
This new chip will be known internally as Lanai or Pineapple, with the screenshot below of Qualcomm’s code showing a reference to the latter. Lānaʻi is the smallest inhabited island in the state of Hawaii — where Qualcomm holds its annual flagship product release summits — and was known for its pineapple plantations. Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison owns 98% of the island (the state government holds the remaining share).
This image also reveals that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is dropping 32-bit support, meaning the chipset will only support 64-bit architecture by default. There’s mention of the Adreno 750 GPU being on board with a clock speed of 770 MHz. But that could change as the chipmaker makes further modifications to the GPU ahead of its wider release. The last bit of info coming from Wojciechowski isn’t particularly surprising, with the chip said to be supporting Linux Kernel 6.1 on Android 14.
Our guess is that with a late 2023 announcement (likely in December when Snapdragon Summits are usually scheduled), devices featuring the brand-new SoC shouldn’t be far away. Considering Qualcomm’s partnership with manufacturers like Samsung, it would be a safe bet to assume that the Galaxy S24 early next year will feature this chipset. Companies like Xiaomi and Nubia should be high up on the list to be among the first to have a phone featuring Qualcomm’s newest mobile chip.
