The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 might be a budget smartphone but there's certainly nothing low-end about the hardware it packs. This is the first phone to roll out with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 650 SoC, which is a pretty big deal given its near-flagship level performance in some benchmarks.
It's a hexa-core SoC, much like the Snapdragon 808 found in theMoto X Style, but instead of the Cortex-A57 cores, we have two of ARM's more powerful Cortex-A72 cores running at 1.8GHz.
The other four cores are Cortex-A53s which chug along at 1.4GHz. This SoC still uses the 28nm fabrication process but the GPU is a newer Adreno 510, which is one notch lower than what's present in the flagship Snapdragon 820 chip.
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 will come in two variants. What we have today is the one with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard storage, but you can opt for the other model with 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage if your budget is tight.
Officially, storage can be expanded by up to 32GB by using a microSD card instead of a second SIM in the hybrid slot, though unofficially you can put cards of bigger storage capacity as well.
