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Proving the adage “ask, and you shall receive”, Qualcomm is back this week for a second Snapdragon SoC announcement for mobile phones. This time, the company is announcing the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, the latest-generation member of their relatively new Snapdragon 7+ lineup of SoCs. Like its predecessor, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, the Gen 3 is aimed at the premium segment of smartphones, offering high-end features with more modest performance and costs – but still a feature set and level of performance ahead of “mid-tier” smartphone SoCs. And, with Monday’s launch of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, this is a segment that has been bifurcated into two lines of SKUs over at Qualcomm.
With last year’s Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 (7pG2) having established the template for the Snapdragon 7+ family, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 (7pG3) has a much easier time defining its role in the world, and sliding into Qualcomm’s product stack. Despite the overarching Snapdragon 7 branding, the 7+ is still a distinctly more powerful chip than the mainline Snapdragon 7 family of chips (such as the vanilla Snapdragon 7 Gen 3), skirting the line between the two families. Most notably, the 7+ remains the lowest tier to get a high-performance Arm Cortex-X class CPU core as its prime CPU core, making a clear delineation between what chip families will and won’t offer flagship-grade single-threaded CPU performance.
Diving into the specifications for the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, it looks suspiciously like a cut-down version of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 – something that’s not too surprising given both the timing of the chip announcements, and the fact that the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 was a cut-down version of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. Qualcomm will never confirm this level of die detail, of course, but the relatively high costs of producing masks for TSMC’s 4nm process means that Qualcomm is highly incentivized to use as few designs as possible to fill out the Snapdragon 7 and 8 series, which currently stands at 5 different SKUs (and seemingly, 4 different dies).
In any case, the 7pG3 retains its status as the cheapest Qualcomm SoC to include an Arm Cortex-X core. Clocked at 2.8GHz, it’s not pushing the same 3GHz+ clockspeeds of the Snapdragon 8 SoCs, but it still means that the 7pG3 comes with the most powerful CPU core Qualcomm offers on their mobile chips today. The rest of the cluster, meanwhile, is the same mix of Cortex-A720 performance cores and Cortex-A520 efficiency cores that we saw on the 8sG3, with a quartet of A720s clocked at 2.6GHz, and finally a trio of A520s clocked at 1.9GHz.
Qualcomm isn’t providing any CPU performance guidance on the 7pG3 versus the 8sG3 – preferring to focus on performance comparisons to the previous-generation Snapdragon 7 chips – but looking at clockspeeds on the otherwise identical CPU clusters, the 7pG3 should deliver around 90% of the 8sG3’s CPU performance.
