Phones come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They also come at all sorts of performance levels. While too much power is better than too little, more power comes at a cost. That’s why chip manufacturers like Qualcomm need to make SoCs for all rungs of the ladder.
For those in the crowd who tend to focus on mid-range devices thanks to a sensible balance between price and performance, Qualcomm has launched a new chip for you: the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. They launched it pretty quietly, but it comes with a little bit more than its predecessor.
Qualcomm Skips Gen 2 And Quietly Brings Us The Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, With More Power
Around this time in 2022, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1, a chip running on a new tier of its mid-range options. It had quite a bit of potential and supported most of the things that you’d expect from a mid-range chip like fast refresh rate, 4K video output, and high-resolution cameras. However, when 2023 came around, there was no Gen 2 chip to succeed it.
The year is 2024, and Qualcomm has finally come out with another Snapdragon 6 SoC (besides the Snapdragon 6s Gen 3). However, quite interestingly, they’ve decided to entirely skip Gen 2 and head to calling this the Gen 3 chip. The reason seems a little obvious to me, and it’s simply that they wanted to keep the naming of most of their 2024 chips in alignment (though we will be getting the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 this year).
The major change that you’ll pick at first glance is that the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 overclocks its big cores compared to the Gen 1 option. It is still built on a 4nm process and you get 4 Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz as opposed to 2.2 GHz last year. The 4 Cortex-A55 cores remain at 1.8 GHz. This amounts to a 10% improvement in performance.
The GPU is unchanged: an Adreno 710. However, it brings 30% faster graphics rendering over the exact same GPU in the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1. The NPU also gets 20% improved performance for AI tasks, which is a must-have in our modern era.
Beyond Improved Performance, The Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 Brings Little Else
The Snapdragon 6 brings a little bit better performance in the CPU, GPU, and NPU categories, but if you’re expecting much else besides that, you’re not going to find it with this chip. All the other duties of an SoC remain unchanged compared to the previous Snapdragon 6 model.
For instance, you get support for triple cameras with up to 200MP resolution, FHD+ screens with 120Hz refresh rate, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, 4K video playback, and LPDDR5 RAM. However, all of these were present on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 1.
As a consumer, if you’re going for a midrange device, you likely won’t need more than what this chip supports, but for a year off the grid, the upgrade feels very minimal. I guess that explains why Qualcomm decided to launch this one really quietly.
