The latest flagship-grade chipset from Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, was unveiled on Monday and comes with a number of on-device artificial intelligence (AI) features. The company’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, which debuted in October of last year, is positioned below the new 4nm chipset, which is a more reasonably priced variant of the top-tier Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. Together with support for fast generative AI models with up to 10 billion parameters, it has some hardware features from the company’s flagship processor.
Timeline for Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 availability
According to the company, smartphones from brands like Honor, iQoo Redmi, Realme, and Xiaomi will support the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 mobile platform. Qualcomm also disclosed that the first phone to use the newest chipset will be accessible later this month, but it withheld any other details about the phone’s features.
Specs for the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
The recently released Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is an octa-core, 4nm chipset featuring three ‘efficiency’ cores clocked at 2.0GHz, four ‘performance’ cores with a peak clock speed of 2.8GHz, and a Prime core (Cortex-X4) clocked at 3.0GHz. As per the company, the Adreno GPU integrated into the chipset facilitates real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing in compatible games and supports high definition multimedia. Up to 24GB of LPDDR5x memory operating at 4200MHz and UFS 4.0 storage will be supported.
Additionally, Qualcomm highlights the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip’s AI capabilities, which include support for on-device generative AI models with up to 10 billion parameters. At launch, the chip supported over 30 large language models (LLMs) and large vision models (LVMs), including Baichuan-7B, Llama 2, and Gemini Nano. According to the company, an image-based or written prompt will be able to generate content for an on-device generative AI assistant, and an AI-powered photo expansion tool will be able to create images outside of an image’s frame.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset has a triple 18-bit ISP configuration, and smartphones with it will be able to take 200-megapixel pictures. Additionally, the chip is capable of AI-based face detection, which can be accessed through Qualcomm Sensing Hub and an always-sensing Internet provider. Videos taken in low light conditions are also supposed to have better quality thanks to the company’s Snapdragon Low Light Vision (LLV) technology.
According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 can handle displays up to 144Hz and 60Hz for 4K and Quad-HD+, respectively. Additionally, the chipset supports an ultra-low power always-sensing camera that enables fast facial unlocking for the phone and is reportedly isolated from the rest of the hardware.
Supporting both mmWave and Sub-6 5G networks, the new chipset has the Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF system, which is a step down from its more expensive sibling. It has a peak download speed of up to 5Gbps and an upload speed of up to 3.5Gbps. It supports Dual-Sim Dual Active (DSDA) for both 4G and 5G networks.
Up to 5.8Gbps download speeds over Wi-Fi 7 networks are possible with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3’s Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 mobile connectivity system. Along with support for Qualcomm’s aptX audio codecs, Snapdragon Sound, Bluetooth LE audio, and Auracast broadcast, the chip also offers dual Bluetooth antennas for Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity.