Qualcomm has recently announced the addition of a new member to the Snapdragon 8 series chip family—the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. This latest addition promises to usher in a new era for the high-end smartphone segment. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is being marketed as a more affordable option that offers the capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 series, found on many Android smartphones.
Qualcomm’s focus for the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is spread across four areas – on-device artificial intelligence (AI), high-end image processor (ISP), powerful graphics for mobile games, and connectivity. The company leads connectivity with high-resolution audio. The chip is designed to enhance user experience by providing on-device synthetic AI capabilities and advanced photography features that promote creativity and productivity in everyday life. The company hopes to bring unique capabilities to more consumers with the new chip family.
Manufactured on a 4nm process, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 has 8 core clusters, including 1 Cortex-X4 core running at 3 GHz, 4 Cortex-A720 cores running at 2.8 GHz, and 3 Cortex-A520 cores running at 2.8 GHz. At 2 GHz, the integrated Adreno GPU supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. However, the chip lacks the Global Illumination feature found on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which also has high-speed CPU cores and faster memory.
The ISP on Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is similar to that on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, with the only exception being the lack of 8K HDR video recording ability (up to 4K 60 FPS). Despite this, it supports H.265, VP9, and AV1 decoding at up to 4K resolution.
On the connectivity front, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and the integrated X70 modem supports download speeds of up to 5,000 Mbps in 5G mmWave and sub-6 GHz networks.
The first smartphones equipped with Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 are expected to launch later this month. Qualcomm has mentioned some original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) using the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, including Honor, iQOO, realm, Redmi, and Xiaomi.
