Qualcomm on Monday announced its latest and the first "8s" series flagship mobile platform - the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, intending to enable on-device generative AI capabilities on more Android smartphones. Major Android OEMs like Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi are confirmed to launch Snapdragon 8s Gen 3-powered smartphones in the coming weeks. The key highlights of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 include the support of major large language models such as Baichuan-7B, Llama 2, and Google's Gemini Nano, and the processor is capable of handling on-device AI models with up to 10 billion parameters. “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,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. The on-device AI engine can handle tasks like generative-AI-powered virtual assistant, image generation, and it also has multi-modal gen-AI model support. Smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 processor can also offer experiences like on-device photo expansion, and the AI also powers the camera capabilities, powered by the 18-bit triple cognitive ISP. Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 technical specifications The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is an octa-core processor with one prime core clocked at 3GHz, four performance cores with a 2.8GHz clock speed, and three efficiency cores with up to 2GHz clock speed. The processor is fabbed using TSMC's 4nm process and it also comes with the latest Adreno GPU. The key differences between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 can be limited to the CPU clock speed, networking capabilities, graphics, and AI capabilities. Qualcomm also confirmed that the graphics performance of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 sits between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. While the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing, it does not support Global illumination like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 comes with the Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF System with up to 5Gbps downlink speed. The chip does support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. The processor can handle a display with up to 4K resolution at 60fps or a 2K resolution display with up to 144Hz. It also supports up to 200 MP cameras; however, there is no 8K video recording capability, and it offers up to 4K 60fps HDR video recording. There is fast UFS 4.0 support along with up to 24 GB of LP-DDR5x RAM with up to 4200 MHz.
