Stateside Android aficionados are unlikely to get their hands on aSnapdragon 8 Gen 3phone until theSamsung Galaxy S24andOnePlus 12make their expected debuts some time in January, but the rest of the world hasn’t had so long to wait. I was able to get my hands on the iQOO 12, one of the first phones in the world to ship with Qualcomm’s latest chipset, along with a meaty array of other specs: up to 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, and a 144Hz AMOLED display.
But the real appeal of the phone remains that 4nm chip at its heart, and especially the octa-core Kryo CPU that drives performance. With an all-new 64-bit architecture this year, it’s dominated by a primary 3.3GHz Cortex-X4 core, five performance A720 cores (three at 3.2GHz, two at 3.0GHz), and two 2.3GHz A520 cores.
With all that power, it’s no real surprise to find that the iQOO 12 cruises through the day-to-day. Together with that high refresh rate display, I found myself flying through routine tasks, multitasking with ease and processing photos in a flash. It would take some work to slow this thing down or even heat it up. A multi-core score of 6736 in GeekBench 6 sits about where you’d expect it to: 20% up on 8 Gen 2 phones, give or take, though how much credence you give a GeekBench score is up to you.
Genshin Impact is probably a better test case. Still at the demanding end of Android games, just downloading the game files can get most phones toasty, let alone actually playing the damn thing. And sure, the iQOO 12 did get warmer while installing and playing a half-hour or so of Genshin, but hardly enough to notice — and well below the threshold for worrying about either discomfort or throttling. The game itself ran great, for the record, with hardly a dropped frame along the way.
Just as importantly, battery life has impressed me so far too. Outside of testing time, I’m not much of a power user, so take my experience with a pinch of salt, but I’ve hardly hit the 50% mark on the iQOO 12’s 5,000mAh battery each day. Power efficiency doesn’t seem to be much of a concern either.
No doubt it helps that iQOO supplied me with the top spec model, its 16GB of LPDDR5X memory smoothing things along. Other2024 flagshipswill match that, of course, but more people will experience the 8 Gen 3 attached to 8GB or 12GB of RAM. That may diminish the returns slightly, but not so much as to be a concern.
It’s also worth noting that the iQOO 12 is boosted by a second chip alongside Qualcomm’s own. The “Supercomputing Chip Q1” is a custom display chip designed to help boost resolution and up frame rates (through a little frame interpolation). These modes are disabled by default though, so it’s easy enough to confirm that the 8 Gen 3 is capable of doing the legwork on its own.
Of course, when Qualcomm announced the 8 Gen 3 this fall, the company spoke less about the chip’s graphical prowess and more about itsability to compete in the AI arms race. That side of things is trickier to test: benchmarks for Android machine learning performance aren’t great, and the promise of on-device stable diffusion image generation in under a second is still mostly theoretical until the software side catches up.
The best look we have at the chip’s AI abilities comes down, as ever, to photo processing.iQOO’s parent company Vivois one of the best in the business at that, and the iQOO 12’s punchy triple camera (50 MP main and ultrawide, with a 64MP 3x telephoto) comes closer than you’d probably expect to rivaling thebest camera phonesright now.
So should you rush to pick up an iQOO 12? Well, unless you live in India, Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia, probably not. My few days with the phone have impressed me for sure —alongside the pure performance I’m a fan of the usual BMW-inspired design, slick screen, and silly speedy 120W fast charging. But more Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phonesare just around the corner,and most of us will be better served by waiting for the Samsung and OnePlus phones that are sure to pack an 8 Gen 3 and should hit US stores in a month or so.
But at least now we know there’s something worth looking forward to. A solid year-on-year performance uplift, and what so far seem to be trustworthy thermals and practical power efficiency. And now we can all get on with worrying about what upgrades they’ll pack into the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 instead.
