Five months after announcing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in Maui at the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm is back with a new processor. This is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. This processor is a bit of an enigma; according to Qualcomm, it is just below the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and focuses more on AI.
Qualcomm says that major OEMs including HONOR, iQOO, realm, Redmi and Xiaomi will launch devices with Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 in 'the coming months.' In 2024, we have heard an incredible amount about AI. It's embedded in pretty much every product announcement these days, and it continues with the Snapdragon 8's Gen 3. This new chipset is capable of delivering high-speed on-device generative AI with up to 10 billion parameters.
It also includes an always-sensory ISP, hyper-realistic mobile gaming, cutting-edge connectivity and lossless high-definition audio. It also supports several AI models including Baichuan-7B, Llama 2 and Gemini Nano. On the surface, it is an underclocked one with a slightly different architecture compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 includes a Prime core that goes up to 3.4 GHz, five performance cores up to 3.2 GHz and two efficiency cores up to 2.3 GHz.
Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 uses one Prime core up to 3 GHz, four performance cores up to 2.8 GHz and three efficiency cores up to 2 GHz. That should lead to better battery life here. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 also uses the older Snapdragon X70 5G modem, which means it only supports 3GPP Release 17 and not Release 18 like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 does.
This also means that the theoretical sownlink is halved to only 5 Gbps. On the video side, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 does not offer 8K video support at all. At the same time, 4K video is limited to 60fps. Night Vision video recording with RAW AI noise reduction in 4K 60 fps is also missing on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3.
Essentially, this is a downgrade from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which should make the component cheaper for OEMs to buy and put into their phones. We'll have to wait for the first Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 phones to see if that savings is passed on to the consumer or not.