Qualcomm, an American semiconductor company, announced the release of its upcoming chipset last March 18, 2024 for phone manufacturers. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, which is a premium processor in the lineup of Snapdragon processors, boasts some of the qualities of its bigger sibling, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, with some minor adjustments to its architecture.
According to GSMArena, this chip is fabricated in a 4nm process, made by TSMC. It has a 1+4+3 core architecture, unlike its bigger sibling which follows a 1+5+2 core architecture. This new processor will boast 1 Cortex-X4 prime core, which has a clock speed of 3.0 GHz, 4 Cortex-A720 performance cores clocked at 2.8 GHz and 3 Cortex-A520 efficiency cores clocked at 2.0 GHz.
It supports the latest LPDDR5x RAM clocked at 4200 MHz and it also uses UFS 4.0 storage and USB 3.1 (Gen 2). The GPU of this processor will be a downclocked version of the past flagship offering of Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which is the Adreno 735, even though there’s some minor adjustments to its GPU, it still supports hardware ray tracing, which can be helpful in some cases, especially in gaming.
 |
| Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 specifications |
According to GIZGUIDE, this processor also boasts AI capabilities, like its bigger sibling. It can use Generative AI to create images with a simple prompt (it depends on the phone manufacturer if they use this technology) and other AI models like Llama 2, Baichuan-7B, and Gemini Nano. When it comes to its modem, the processor uses last year’s offering, the X70 modem, which is also the first modem that uses AI to deliver 10 Gigabit 5G speeds, with low latency and wide coverage. The ISP is still the same across the board, “triple 18-bit” configuration, which allows for high megapixel count capturing and images, but the video recording capability is downgraded to 4K HDR 60 FPS.
This kind of processor is not new to Qualcomm, since they already made a quasi-flagship processor last year, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, which is considered by many as a downclocked version of Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. But this move by Qualcomm can shake up the competition because its rival chip maker, MediaTek, had been making rounds this year, with the release of the Dimensity 8300 last November, which boasts a AnTuTu score that is higher with Qualcomm’s offering in the quasi-flagship territory.
Rumors suggest that this processor will power the upcoming phones from Xiaomi, Redmi (sub-brand of Xiaomi), and iQOO (sub-brand of vivo), which are the Xiaomi CIVI 4 Pro, Redmi Note 13 Turbo and iQOO Z9 Turbo. This processor will be put into a test once these phones will come out in the near future.
Source: GSMArena, GIZGUIDE
Comments