A previous leak may have revealed the majority of the information that Qualcomm provided today, but that did not prevent the chipset maker from officially announcing its next flagship silicon, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Armed with a host of performance boosts over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the latest SoC means business, and more importantly, the latest release is a prime example of just how serious Qualcomm is taking AI, as smartphones featuring the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will also support on-device artificial intelligence capabilities.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is also equipped with 12MB L3 cache, up from 8MB on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2
First, let us finish the specifications; prior to the official announcement, rumors claimed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 would sport a ‘1 + 5 + 2‘ CPU cluster. On this occasion, the rumors were not 100 percent correct, as though there is a single Cortex-X4 core running at 3.30GHz and a total of five Cortex-A720 cores, three of them operate at 3.20GHz, while the rest function at 3.00GHz.
As for the remaining two, the Cortex-A520 cores are running at 2.30GHz. There is LPDDR5X RAM support up to 24GB, with speeds of 4,800MHz, an Adreno 750 GPU that supports ray tracing, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, the Snapdragon X75 5G modem, and more. There is also 12MB of cache, which has increased from 8MB on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
How fast is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2?
Qualcomm was kind enough to share the performance and efficiency improvements of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The latest SoC’s CPU is said to be 30 percent faster while consuming 20 percent less power, with the Adreno 750 graphics processor being 25 percent more powerful and energy efficient than the previous generation.
We understand that companies like Qualcomm have a propensity to provide inflated comparison figures, so we will await real-world and synthetic results to get a clearer picture. For those interested, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can deliver 50 percent increased ray tracing performance compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
AI, audio, and gaming improvements - Qualcomm’s focus has increased on artificial intelligence
The term ‘AI’ is no longer a buzzword, as companies continue to introduce their implementations in various products and services. With Qualcomm, its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can run up to 15 tokens per second with over 10 billion parameters for instant AI assistant responses. The San Diego firm also boasts the world’s fastest stable diffusion, which can generate images in a fraction of a second.
That is not all because AI also brings enhancements to the camera, bringing features such as Semantic Segmentation, Night Vision video, object eraser in videos, Vlogger’s View, Photo Expansion, and more. The new Hexagon NPU is also 98 percent more powerful than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2’s NPU while consuming 40 percent less power.
As for gaming, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can officially support external monitors up to an 8K resolution with upscaling and a 240Hz refresh rate. On the smartphone’s own display, Qualcomm says that its latest chip tops out at 144Hz at QHD+ resolution, though it should be noted that phone makers have used higher refresh rate values while using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. As for audio, there is 24-bit 96KHz lossless support.
Qualcomm has said that several manufacturers sporting the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be announced in the coming weeks, so we will have proper information on their launches. As for a little performance teaser, the Xiaomi 14 tested with the same chip outperformed the A17 Pro in Geekbench 6’s multi-core test, making it the fastest smartphone SoC at this time.
