Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC for smartphones will be released earlier than predecessors

Smartphones with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be available in the coming weeks. The processor designer has announced this. This means that Qualcomm’s most expensive smartphone SoC will be released earlier than its predecessors.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is probably in the Xiaomi 14 phones that the Chinese manufacturer will present on Thursday. The release at the end of October is earlier than for previous generations. The first phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 appeared in December last year, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in December 2021.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is mainly focused on generative AI, Qualcomm reports. The social media can run language models with up to ten billion parameters on the device. The NPU cluster for AI tasks is up to 98 percent faster than in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and offers up to 40 percent more performance per Watt.

This is again a CPU cluster with eight cores. There is a Prime core that can go up to 3.3GHz and is derived from the ARM Cortex X4. In addition, there are five performance cores up to 3.2GHz and two more economical cores that work up to 2.3GHz. This differs from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which has three more efficient cores. The GPU supports Unreal Engine 5 and is 25 percent faster and 25 percent more efficient, Qualcomm claims.

Furthermore, the camera now has support for Google Ultra HDR, which means that smartphones other than the Pixel 8 devices should also be able to display images shot in Ultra HDR. Storage is up to UFS 4.0, memory is up to 24GB of lppddr5x. The SoC supports 5G up to 10Gbit/s and WiFi 7. TSMC makes the SoCs on 4nm. ASUS, Honor, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Sony, vivo and Xiaomi, among others, will work with the SoC, the American processor designer says.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3