Today, March 18, Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor, which continues the flagship 8-series line. The mobile platform offers a set of premium features similar to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but will be more affordable for smartphone manufacturers due to some hardware concessions. At the same time, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 puts more emphasis on artificial intelligence technologies and features significantly improved optimization.
Technically, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip is manufactured using the same 4-nanometer TSMC process and also uses the main ARM Cortex-X4 prime core. The difference starts here and lies in the reduced clock frequency: 3.0 GHz instead of 3.3/3.4 GHz, similar for the remaining cores – productive Cortex-A720 operates at 2.8 GHz instead of 3.15 GHz, and energy-efficient Cortex-A520 at 2.0 GHz instead of 2.3 GHz. The core layout itself has also been changed, so the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 has a 1x4x3 architecture, while the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has 1x5x2 (that is, more powerful cores).
The model received a simplified core layout and the previous 5G modem, so it will be cheaper. Although the power is comparable to 8 Gen 3
Other differences include an Adreno 735 GPU instead of the Adreno 750, a built-in 5G modem from the previous generation Snapdragon X70, like last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, instead of the current Snapdragon X75, and support for up to 24 GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 4200 MHz instead of 4800 MHz. In terms of video shooting, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is only capable of 4K resolution with HDR support and speeds up to 60 frames per second or Full HD at 240 frames (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can record 8K HDR at 30 frames or 4K at 120 frames).
Other strengths of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3:
- support for Wi-Fi 7 networks with higher throughput and lower latency;
- 15-bit lossless wireless audio streaming at 44.1 kHz sampling rate, Auracast support;
- support for a wide range of neural networks with up to 10 billion parameters and on-device image generation;
- hardware optimization for AI models Gemini Nano, Llama 2, Baichuan-7B and Zhipu ChatGLM;
- hardware accelerated ray tracing, Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 (doubles frame rate without the need for additional power consumption) and Snapdragon Game Super Resolution (adds pixels using AI, scaling image resolution in real time);
- H.265 and AV1 video decoding (up to 4K at 60 frames) with HDR (HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLG).
Several renowned companies have already chosen Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 for their next smartphones. Among the confirmed partners are Xiaomi and Redmi, HONOR, Realme and iQOO. The first models based on Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will appear in the coming months.
