Qualcomm announced its latest flagship mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, on Tuesday at the Snapdragon Summit. The successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC promises to bring a host of new upgrades and claims to be the first mobile platform focusing on generative AI. The SoC’s AI engine supports multi-modal generative AI models, including popular large language models (LLMs). The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU promises 98 percent faster and 40 percent more efficient performance. It also promises 240 fps gaming on supported displays, featuring global illumination with ray tracing. The Qualcomm Adreno GPU is claimed to be 25 percent faster and more efficient than the one on Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. The 5G-ready chip supports Wi-Fi 7 and dual Bluetooth.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Availability
According to Qualcomm, flagship Android devices powered by its latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC are expected to be available in the coming weeks. The chip will be adopted for flagship devices by global OEMs and smartphone brands, including ASUS, Honor, iQOO, MEIZU, NIO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 features
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC comes with the Qualcomm AI engine, featuring an improved hexagon process claimed to be 98 percent faster and 40 percent more efficient. The chip brings generative AI capabilities, promising the world’s fastest stable diffusion for image generation. The chip is based on the 4nm processing technology, with the Qualcomm Kryo CPU delivering up to 3.3 GHz at 30 percent faster and 20 percent more efficient rates. The CPU comes with five Performance cores, up to 3.2 GHz, and two Efficiency cores, up to 2.3 GHz.
The chip also promises high-end gaming performance, featuring hardware-accelerated ray tracing with global illumination. The chip promises 240 fps gaming on supported displays, with the Qualcomm Adreno GPU claimed to be 25 percent faster and more efficient.
The new chip also promises a bunch of new camera features powered by AI. The chip comes with a Video Object Eraser by Arcsoft that removes unwanted elements and people from a video. It also gets new zoom capabilities, powered by Samsung’s 200-megapixel image sensor optimized for Snapdragon, allowing multiple video capture, object tracking and 2X and 4X zoom. It supports Dolby HDR and features Photo Expansion, which fills up photos with the help of AI.
For connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 brings the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 System, the same as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, with support for Wi-Fi 7 802.11be, 802.11ax, 802.11ac, 802.11a/b/g/n, and Bluetooth 5.4. The latest chip features the Snapdragon X75 5G Modem-RF System. The mobile platform is claimed to feature the world’s first 5G modem with an integrated AI tensor hardware accelerator.
The chip also supports 24-bit 96 kHz lossless music over Bluetooth, USB Version 3.1 Gen 2, USB Type-C, and UFS 4.0 storage.