While most flagship-tier smartphones today run on Qualcomm’s ultra-powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, the company recently announced the arrival of a somewhat similarly-powerful chipset, albeit meant for upper-midrange smartphones, also known as “flagship killer” devices – enter the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, which packs a lot of the same features as its “regular” 8 Gen 3 sibling, while cutting down on costs. Chris Patrick, Senior Vice president and General Manager of Mobile Handsets at Qualcomm states:
“With capabilities including on-device generative AI and advanced photography features, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is designed to enhance user experiences, fostering creativity and productivity in their daily lives… We’re elated to introduce the latest addition to our premium Snapdragon 8-series, our most premium mobile offering, bringing a host of exceptional specially selected capabilities to more consumers.”
Designed on a on a 4 nm process with a 1+4+3 core configuration, Qualcomm says that the 8s Gen 3 is capable of supporting premium-tier features such as on-device generative AI features, an always-sensing ISP, hyper-realistic mobile gaming, breakthrough connectivity, as well as lossless high-definition sound. The new SoC also supports a broad array of AI models including popular large language models (LLM) such as Baichuan-7B, Llama 2, Gemini Nano and Zhipu ChatGLM.
Given that generative AI has been a major focus for most OEMs in the past couple of years, it’s not exactly surprising to see Qualcomm bring such features to a slightly lower-tier chip, although it’s a much-welcome add-on and does slow down device obsoletion. As far as hardware is concerned, the new chip consists of a Prime ARM Cortex X4 which is clocked at 3.0 GHz, and works in tandem with four Performance cores at 2.8 GHz, as well as three Efficiency cores at 2.0 GHz.
The debut of the 8s Gen 3 follows the unveiling of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which was announced back in October during Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit. With that being said, we can expect to see the 8s Gen 3 in action in upcoming devices from several partner manufacturers including Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi and Xiaomi; Qualcomm notes that the first device running the 8s Gen 3 will be announced this March. William Lu, Partner and President of Xiaomi Corporation comments:
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies to introduce the first device powered by Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 – coming soon… This new mobile platform will allow us to provide our customers with a personalized premium experience, all thanks to generative AI.”
