Leaked specs for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is expected to be used in Samsung's Galaxy S24 and other upcoming Android phones, may have revealed possible features and capabilities as soon as possible.

According to details released by MSPowerUser, the 8 Gen 3 chip has improved overall performance and supports new graphics and AI features. Assuming smartphone makers can take advantage of all the new technology Qualcomm has added to the new Snapdragon chips, next year's Android flagships could take a considerable leap forward.

To start with the basics, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is manufactured on a 4nm process, not as cutting edge as the 3nm process used by the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro chip, but still quite advanced. The Kryo CPU is the fastest "prime" core running at 3.3 GHz, with five performance cores and two efficiency cores dropping to 3.2 GHz and 2.3 GHz. Compared to this year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which runs at up to 3.2 GHz on most phones, the Gen 3 CPU is apparently 30% faster and estimated to be 20% more efficient.

Next, it has an Adreno 750 GPU that "outperforms the console," which is apparently 25% faster and 25% more efficient than the Adreno 740 GPU in the previous Snapdragon. It also appears to offer ray-tracing graphics like the A17 Pro and video upscaling to 8K for more vivid gaming.

Finally, there is a Hexagon NPU dedicated to AI applications. According to leaked documents, it will be the first smartphone chip to support a "multi-modality generative AI model"; AI performance will also be faster and more efficient, with 98% better performance and 40% better efficiency.

This sounds like some key pieces of photo upgrades the chip boasts, including a video object eraser (which sounds at least like Google's Magic eraser tool for Pixel phones), AI photo enhancement, and generative AI backgrounds for video Sounds like.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also has a built-in Qualcomm X75 modem, which appears to offer download speeds of 10 Gbps and upload speeds of 3.5 Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 is also supported. This is the latest Wi-Fi standard and is currently only supported by the Google Pixel 8 and OnePlus 11.

Hopefully, all these features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be announced as part of the Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii today. It will be a few months before we start seeing phones with this chip, but the Android flagship coming out next year is going to be worthy of being named Best Android Phone, more for its performance than anything else. And with any luck, users of these new Androids will get a few tricks that iPhone users will want to take advantage of.