Phones running the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor could get the biggest power upgrade in years

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 pictured above is the power inside some of the very best Android phones, so of course the third generation will be powering the next generation of flagships. And judging by newly leaked benchmarks, it's going to deliver a serious performance boost to those phones.

The benchmarks have been shared on Chinese social media platform Weibo by tipster Digital Chat Station, aka DCS. According to their figures, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 racked up a total score of 2 million points compared to the Gen 2's 1.6 million. In this context, bigger numbers re better.

That's good news if you're hankering after something like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, because those benchmarks represent a really significant speed boost.

What do the benchmarks say about the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3?

According to DCS, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 achieves 40% better performance in the AnTuTu GPU test compared to its predecessor, racking up an impressive 840K points. The most likely explanation for that is a new GPU, which is believed to be the Andreno 750 GPU. The current Andreno in the Gen 2 is the 740 model.

We've been hearing multiple rumours about that new Andreno GPU for months now, and it could be the first 1GHz Andreno to make it into smartphone silicon. The Cortex-X4 cores in the Snapdragon are also expected to run at significantly higher speeds than the current generation; previous reports had suggested performance gains of 15-20%, and that fits with DCS's benchmarks of 15.7% better performance in the CPU test. The combination of faster cores, a more powerful GPU and faster RAM should mean a very significant and noticeable performance improvement in Android phones.

Of course, there's much more to smartphone performance than sheer power, especially when it comes to very computationally intensive tasks such as photography and video. And as with any smartphone or processor rumour, it's wise to take everything with a pinch of salt until the official announcement is made and the full specifications revealed. But the benchmarks reported by DCS certainly seem plausible, and if they are correct then the next generation of Android flagships looks set to be significantly smoother and more responsive than the current already impressive crop.