Qualcomm has officially unveiled its flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, the specifications of which were revealed by insiders just a couple of days before the release. The company claims that the new chip will provide 30% faster performance and 20% faster graphics, according to ArsTechnica.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a unique 1:5:2 core configuration. Traditionally, chips have one large core, three medium cores, and four small cores, each of which performs different computing tasks. However, the new Snapdragon processor has one large core, five medium cores, and two small cores.

The main core is an Arm Cortex X4 operating at 3.3 GHz. Of the five middle cores, three operate at 3.2 GHz and the remaining two at 3.0 GHz. Qualcomm claims that this processor configuration provides a 30% speed boost and is 20% more energy efficient. The chip is manufactured using a 4 nm process technology.

Although Qualcomm has always been somewhat tight-lipped about the specifics of its GPUs, the new Adreno 750 accelerator is claimed to be 25% faster and 25% more energy efficient. It also supports Unreal Engine 5 Lumen and offers improved ray tracing capabilities.

A significant part of Qualcomm’s presentation was devoted to artificial intelligence capabilities. Supporting the trend of generative AI, Qualcomm aims to allow devices to run large AI models, such as Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion, locally, which is usually a task reserved for cloud operations due to the size of AI models.

The Hexagon DSP/NPU coprocessor has the potential to be 98% faster and 40% more energy efficient for local tasks such as processing camera images or applying Snapchat filters. Demonstrations also showed the chip’s ability to remove objects from video.

Although Qualcomm has not announced an official release date, rumors suggest that Xiaomi 14 may be the first smartphone to be powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. However, next year we will see more flagship models based on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.