Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 with on-device AI

Qualcomm today revealed the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 as a smartphone chip with some flagship-level features that comes in below the 8 Gen 3. 

The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is built on a 4 nm process with a 1+4+3 core configuration. There’s one Prime ARM Cortex X4 clocked at 3.0 GHz, four Performance cores (2.8 GHz), and three Efficiency cores (2.0 GHz). It differs from the 8 Gen 3’s 1+5+2 that trades an Efficiency core for another Performance core.

Qualcomm frames the 8s Gen 3 as featuring “specially curated,” or selected, flagship features. There’s support for on-device generative AI, like Gemini Nano, though the same large language and vision models (up to 10 billion parameters) would run faster on the 8 Gen 3. 

Meanwhile, you get an always-sensing ISP that allows for real-time semantic segmentation to identify up to 12 layers (faces, hair, clothes, sky, etc.) in images/videos. 

Other areas of focus include gaming (real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing), connectivity (though it’s X70 support instead of X75), and audio (LE Audio with Auracast), as well as Snapdragon Seamless cross-device experiences.

Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi will be using the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 over the coming months, with the first device announcement coming in March.