Qualcomm on Monday announced the launch of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, the company’s latest flagship-grade chipset that is equipped with several on-device artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The new 4nm chipset arrives as a more affordable version of the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip that was launched in October last year and sits above the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the company’s flagship chip from 2022. It offers some hardware features from the company’s flagship processor, along with support for high-speed generative AI models with up to 10 billion parameters.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 availability timeline
The company says that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 mobile platform will be available on smartphones from companies like Honor, iQoo Redmi, Realme, and Xiaomi. Qualcomm also revealed that the first handset to be powered with the latest chipset will be available later this month, but did not reveal any further information regarding the phone or its specifications.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 specifications
The newly unveiled Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a 4nm octa-core chipset with a Prime core (Cortex-X4) clocked at 3.0GHz, four ‘performance’ cores with a peak clock speed of 2.8GHz, and three ‘efficiency’ cores clocked at 2.0GHz. The Adreno GPU onboard the chipset offers support for HDR gaming along with real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing in supported games, according to the company. It will support up to 24GB of LPDDR5x memory at up to 4200MHz and UFS 4.0 storage.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports over 30 on-device generative AI models
Photo Credit: Qualcomm
Qualcomm also touts the AI capabilities of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip, which offers support of on-device generative AI models with up to 10 billion parameters — the chip supports over 30 large language models (LLMs) and large vision models (LVMs) at launch, including Gemini Nano, Llama 2, and Baichuan-7B. The company says that an on-device generative AI assistant will be able to generate content from written, spoken, or image prompts, while a photo expansion tool can generate images outside an image’s frame using AI.
Smartphones equipped with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will be able to capture images at 200-megapixel images, and the chipset features a triple 18-bit ISP setup. The chip also supports AI-based face detection that is enabled via an always-sensing ISP via Qualcomm Sensing Hub. The company’s Snapdragon Low Light Vision (LLV) technology is also said to improve the quality of videos captured in dim environments.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports 4K and Quad-HD+ displays at 60Hz and 144Hz, respectively. The chipset also supports an ultra-low power always-sensing camera that is said to be isolated from the rest of the phone’s hardware and allows the handset to enable quick facial unlocking.
The new chipset features the Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF system (a step down from its more premium sibling) and supports both mmWave and Sub-6 5G networks. It offers Dual-Sim Dual Active (DSDA) support for 5G and 4G networks and has a peak download speed of up to 5Gbps and upload speeds of up to 3.5Gbps.
The Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 mobile connectivity system on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 offers up to 5.8Gbps download speeds over Wi-Fi 7 networks. The chip also supports Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity via dual Bluetooth antennas, along with support for Snapdragon Sound, Bluetooth LE audio, Auracast broadcast, and Qualcomm’s aptX audio codecs.