Qualcomm has announced a new flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. At first, this sounds like an upgraded version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but it’s the opposite of that. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a slightly less powerful version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm says that this new SOC combines the best of last year’s 8 Gen 2 & this year’s 8 Gen 3. This also means that the 8s Gen 3 is a more affordable chipset than the 8 Gen 3, so we may see some “Flagship Killer” devices this year with this chipset.
The 8s Gen 3 is built on the TSMC’s 4nm process. The octa-core CPU features a prime Cortex-X4 core clocked at 3.0GHz, four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.8GHz, and three Cortex-A520 cores clocked at 2.0GHz. So, the CPU has a 1 + 4 + 3 core configuration, compared to 1 + 5 + 3 in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
The last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 had a prime Cortex-X3 core in the CPU clocked at up to 3.36GHz, and this year’s 8 Gen 3 has a prime Cortex-X4 core clocked at up to 3.4GHz. So, compared to both, the 8s Gen 3 has a prime core with a lower clock speed. Still, since the chip has upgraded ARM cores compared to the 8 Gen 2’s CPU, it should offer a better combination of performance and power efficiency.
The GPU is the Adreno 735, compared to the Adreno 740 in the 8 Gen 2 and the Adreno 750 in the 8 Gen 3. So, based on the name, we can assume that the GPU is less powerful than the 8 Gen 2. The new chipset supports UFS 4.0 storage and LPDDR5X RAM at up to 4,200MHz (versus 4,800MHz in 8 Gen 3). There is the same X70 5G modem as the 8 Gen 2.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 doesn’t support 8K video recording, so the maximum it supports is 4K HDR recording at 60fps.
Speaking of AI, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports on-device Generative AI, with support for multi-modal models including 30+ large language models (LLMs) and large vision models (LVMs).
Qualcomm says Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi are among the first brands that will launch their Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 phones in the coming months.