Alongside their new Snapdragon X Elite platform for PC, Qualcomm has also announced their latest flagship mobile processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm is going big on AI this time, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 their first mobile platform to be built with generative AI in mind, on top of improvements in performance, gaming and camera capabilities.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, built on the 4nm process, will feature a new Kryo CPU packing eight cores. It features a Cortex-X4 prime core running at 3.3GHz, alongside five Cortex-A720 performance cores with three of them running at 3.2GHz and another two at 3.0GHz. Rounding it off are another two Cortex-A520 efficiency cores clocked at 2.3GHz. According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will offer 30% faster performance than before, while also being 20% more efficient. It comes with support for up to 24GB of LPDDR5X memory at up to 4800MHz speeds, along with UFS 4.0 support.
However, it’s really with its new Qualcomm AI Engine that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s capabilities shine through. Built with generative AI as a key focus, this Qualcomm AI Engine is their first to support multi-modal generative AI models which include popular large language models, language vision models and automatic speech recognition at over 10 billion parameters on-device. Responsible for this is its upgraded Hexagon NPU, which is now 98% more powerful than before, allowing for LLM models to run at up to 15 tokens/sec, and also offers the world’s fastest stable diffusion image generation. Complementing this is the Qualcomm Sensing Hub, whose AI performance is now up by 3.5 times, improving on-device personalisation and enhancing AI-powered virtual assistant experiences.
There’s also notable upgrades in the graphics department. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 features a new Adreno GPU that is capable of not just real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing with global illumination, but also supports Unreal Engine 5 with lumen global illumination, a first for Snapdragon. It is not only 25% faster than before, but is also 25% more power efficient, and Qualcomm claims Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will allow mobile gamers to push up to 240FPS in-game thanks to Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0, its next gen frame generation algorithm. Snapdragon Game Super resolution meanwhile offers upscaling of game scenes up to 8K resolution on external displays.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 features new AI-powered camera features too. Its new Cognitive ISP allows for generative AI photo and video editing, such as Video Object Eraser. Its generative AI capabilities lets you ‘extend’ a photo beyond what the photo you actually took. Zoom Anyplace meanwhile uses Samsung’s 200MP image sensors to offer the capture of multiple videos, object tracking, 2x and 4x zoom all in 4K. Qualcomm is also working with Truepic, adding a cryptographic seal to prove that a photo is real and not made or edited with generative AI.
Other features of note include premium audio with a new Qualcomm Expanded Personal Area Network Technology, giving you uninterrupted lossless audio even when away from your device, or as you’re moving from room to room. You’ll also be getting the best-in-class wireless connectivity here, with a Snapdragon X75 Modem-RF and Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 Mobile Connectivity system providing support for 5G download speeds up to 10Gbps as well as WiFi 7 and Dual Bluetooth.
Qualcomm says you can expect flagship Android smartphones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to launch within the coming weeks. In fact, you won’t even have to wait too long to see it in action, with Xiaomi set to launch their Xiaomi 14 lineup powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 on 26 October, 7pm Malaysian time.
