Last month, Roland Quandt claimed that Qualcomm was testing a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 successor, referred to internally as the SC8280. The report added that the SoC would have Gold+ and Gold cores, eschewing the power-efficiency cores that it included in the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2. Apparently, Qualcomm has been testing its Gold+ cores at 2.7 GHz and the Gold ones at 2.43 GHz.
Now, a Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) supposedly containing the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 has made its way to Geekbench. According to the listing, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 has eight cores and a 2.69 GHz clock speed. While we cannot verify the listing, its ARMv8 (64-bit) Family 8 Model D4B Revision 0' identifier does not correlate with any other chipsets we are aware of. The listing does not provide any other details about the QRD, but it offers insight into its relative performance.
We should stress that these scores would have been achieved with an engineering sample, if they are indeed legitimate. Hence, they will probably be lower than any retail SoC. According to the listing, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 has 40% better single-core performance than the Snapdragon 8cx, we have not benchmarked the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, and 15% lower than the Snapdragon 888. Additionally, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 manages just 56% of Apple M1's performance in the same benchmark.
