Snapdragon 8 Gen3 is said to be a step behind the A17 Pro because it is mass-produced using TSMC's N4P process rather than Taiwan's next-generation 3nm process. Regardless of that difference, Qualcomm's upcoming flagship chip is rumored to be 30% more efficient than the chip Apple is equipping in the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max this year, but consuming less power usually means a compromise in performance.
Just recently, there were reports that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on AnTuTu might not be significantly faster than Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, with a lead of only 15%, but GPU testing showed an impressive 40% difference. The huge gap can only mean that the A17Pro may struggle to compete with upcoming SoCs, especially in real-world graphics and stress tests. However, Revegnus also pointed out that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be 30% more energy efficient than A17 Pro.
While he didn't mention where he got this information from, we saw in multiple tests that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 beat the A16 Bionic quite comprehensively. This year, whistleblowers claim that the GPU performance gap will also widen, with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s Adreno 750 graphics processor said to have a 60% difference compared to the A17 Pro (Apple claims that its A17 Pro’s ray tracing performance is four times faster than the A16 Bionic). Unfortunately, the details are unclear, as it doesn't mention whether Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will take the lead in pure rasterization, ray tracing, or both.
In terms of power efficiency, Qualcomm may nerf the CPU performance of its upcoming SoCs to gain battery life advantages, as increasing the clock speed of the performance core may result in high power consumption and thus hit a power consumption wall or temperature wall.
There are reports that the A17 Pro consumes significantly more power this year, but this is likely to be intentional to create a meaningful difference from the A16 Bionic in both single-core and multi-core. Obviously, the current mass production advantages of TSMC’s 3nm process are not obvious.