Clouds are already curling over the performance of Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, and a new Golden Reviewer report has further exposed the shortcomings. When announcing the new SoC, Qualcomm promised a 30% performance boost, but the new report confirms only a 14% increase with 28% more power consumption. The Cortex-X4 processor is under the scanner and seems to be drawing more power than expected.
The Chinese resource Golden Reviewer has conducted several tests of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 inside the Xiaomi 14 Pro, which uses a triple cluster – 1x Cortex-X4 @ 3.3 GHz, 5x Cortex-A720 (3-3.2 GHz) and 2x Cortex-A520 @ 2.3 GHz.
Thanks to significant hardware improvements, the new chipset has gained a huge performance boost, but at the same time consumes a significant amount of power. In the SPECint06 Big Core benchmark, reviewers recorded a 14% performance increase over Snapdragon 8 Gen 2+, 22% over Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, 43% over Dimensity 9200, and 59% over Google Tensor G3. All these chipsets are equipped with Cortex-X3 processor cores.
However, power consumption is inversely related to performance compared to previous SoCs. According to the benchmark, Snapdragon Gen 3 consumes 28% more power than Cortex-X3 inside Snapdragon 8 Gen 2+. The power consumption is even worse, up to 75% compared to Cortex-X3 on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
The overall efficiency of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 remains at 11.05 Perf/W, which is quite alarming compared to its predecessors, such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2+ and Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which offer 12.42 Perf/W and 15.92 Perf/W, respectively.
