Just after announcing the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 for ‘flagship lite’ smartphones, Qualcomm is back this week with a new mobile platform for the upper premium midrange segment. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, built on TSMC’s 4nm process, is the tech giant’s most powerful 7-series processor yet and also brings with it support for generative AI, a first for this series.
Quickly looking through its spec sheet, you’ll perhaps notice that it’s quite similar to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, with an identical core layout albeit at lower clock speeds. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 comes with a prime Cortex-X4 core clocked at 2.8GHz, four Cortex-A720 performance cores at 2.6GHz and three more Cortex-A530 efficiency cores at 1.9GHz. While it’s certainly less powerful than the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, it’s a marked upgrade over the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 that utilised a Cortex-X2 prime core and the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 which lacked a Cortex-X prime core altogether.
The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 though is markedly less powerful in the graphics department compared to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. While the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 already lost global illumination in games compared to the full Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3’s Adreno GPU also loses out on hardware ray tracing and AV1 decoding altogether. It will still support up to QHD+ resolutions and 120Hz refresh rates though of course, with support for faster LPDDR5X 4200MHz memory and UFS 4.0 storage too along with a triple 18-bit ISP for up to 200MP photos and 4K HDR video.
Apart from that though, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 also comes with some decent capabilities in the generative AI department. This is the first time Qualcomm has debuted on-device generative AI in this series, with support for leading large language models and large vision models. Another big upgrade here is that WiFi 7 is now on a Snapdragon 7-series chip too, with Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 providing support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, while 5G is taken care of by a Snapdragon X63 5G modem.
OnePlus has already confirmed itself to be the first to use the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 system-on-chip in their upcoming OnePlus Ace 3V, a China-only smartphone that will likely be rebadged in some way to become the OnePlus Nord 4 once it hits international shelves. Qualcomm also added that OEM partners Realme and Sharp will be amongst the others adopting the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 in the coming months.
For more about the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 system-on-chip, you can check out its product page on the Qualcomm website here.
