Qualcomm has made the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 official. It’s a new tier in the Snapdragon 8 lineup of chipsets, and it’s for flagship-grade smartphones and tablets. In case you’re confused with the name, the SoC is a step below the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That SoC will hold the flagship title until Qualcomm launches the 8+ Gen 3 or 8 Gen 4.
Now, even though the 8s Gen 3 is a step below the 8 Gen 3, the two share the same core technologies. It’s just Qualcomm has scaled down a couple of features to make the new SoC suitable for more affordable flagship smartphones, tablets, and devices.
More About the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
The 8s Gen 3 aims to deliver most of the regular 8 Gen 3, but with scaled-down specs. One of the main differences is that the newer SoC has one less performance core than the standard 8 Gen 3. Also, all of its cores run at a lower frequency.
To be more specific, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 has four performance cores instead of the five found in the standard 8 Gen 3. And even though it has the same Cortex X4 prime core, it’s clocked at 3 GHz instead of 3.4 GHz. The performance cores run at 2.8 GHz, and the efficiency cores at 2 GHz.
Another notable difference is that the 8s Gen 3 utilizes a previous-gen modem. That is, it comes with a Snapdragon X70 5G modem, which the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 launched with. The good news is that the modem supports the latest WiFi 7 standard.
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Moreover, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 has support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This will make the SoC offer a photorealistic gaming experience. Speaking of which, the new SoC doesn’t have the same GPU as the standard 8 Gen 3. Instead, it comes with the Adreno 740 found in the 8 Gen 3.
Then, You Have the AI Support
As you may have guessed, there’s also support for AI. To be specific, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 has support for on-device AI. It can also run large language models with up to 10 billion parameters. Some examples of these models are Meta’s LLaMA 2 and Google’s Gemini Nano.
Of course, the 8s Gen 3 doesn’t offer all the AI capabilities that the standard 8 Gen 3 does. However, the SoC does support gen AI assistants and image generation.
Some of the Upcoming Phones with Snapdragon 8s Gen 3
As mentioned earlier, the 8s Gen 3 is for affordable flagship smartphones. And Qualcomm has hinted that a good number of these phones are over the horizon. Xiaomi, Redmi, Realme, iQOO, and Honor are expected to debut their offerings soon.
To be exact, iQOO has already announced its new phone with the latest SoC. It’s called iQOO Z9 Turbo, and it’s expected to land in the Chinese market in April. Xiaomi has also announced a new phone with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, the Xiaomi Civi 4 Pro. It aims to offer a noticeable performance leap from Civi 3.
