Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset brings generative AI capabilities to your smartphone

It turns out, that generative AI is not just going to be limited to the cloud anymore. Qualcomm’s newly launched Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, the company’s latest flagship mobile chipset, will bring generative AI capabilities right to your smartphones. Read on to find out more.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset key specifications

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is a 64-bit octa-core Kryo silicon chipset, which promises up to 30 per cent faster performance, and up to 20 per cent more energy efficiency as compared to its predecessor. The accompanying Adreno GPU also allows for 25 per cent faster graphics rendering as well as 25 per cent higher power efficiency.

Coming to connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset is equipped with an X75 modem, which allows for download speeds of up to 10 GBPS and upload speeds of up to 3.5 GBPS. It also supports Wi-Fi 7, which according to Qualcomm, promises up to 5.8 GBPS of wireless internet connectivity speeds. Also available is Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity, for stable device connections and fast data transfer.

What’s more, it also has the Snapdragon Elite Gaming feature, which allows support for smartphones with displays that have refresh rates of up to 240Hz, and even deliver 240fps while gaming.

Qualcomm’s latest offering also features the Snapdragon sound technology suite, as well as the new Qualcomm expanded personal area network technology (XPAN). This, according to Qualcomm, should provide for zero sound loss with wireless audio, and also for 48ms ultra-low latency.

AI features on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset

The successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset brings in support for an AI chatbot trained using Meta’s Llama 2 Large Language Model (LLM). The chatbot can generate text as well as images, and even talk back to you.

Speaking of image generation, with the right prompts, the chipset can generate images in as little as less than a second. To put that into perspective, that’s faster than most high-end laptops and desktops used for photo and video editing, gaming, and so on.

That’s not all. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also supports generative fill for image expansion. This means that you can zoom out photos after they’ve been clicked, and even re-crop them. What’s more, for video, there’s also an object eraser tool, which means you can remove unwanted subjects on the go. The chipset also allows for recording videos in 4K in night mode, at up to 30fps.

There’s also a new vlogger’s view feature introduced with the chipset, for cameras. What it does, is merge the video from the front and the rear cameras together into a single frame. In essence, it removes the background from whatever is being captured by your front camera, and makes it look like you’re standing in front of whatever your rear camera sees.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s AI abilities are stored in what the company calls its AI engine, housed in the hexagon neural processor on the chip. The chipset also has Sensing Hub, a small, always-on AI processor. The latter uses OpenAI’s Whisper machine-learning model for speech recognition. It supplies the AI engine with bits of information about the user, including their location, age, and even their fitness parameters, for personalised responses to queries.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has already been confirmed to feature on several upcoming devices, including the Xiaomi 14 series, the OnePlus 12, the Oppo Find X7, and even Samsung’s upcoming successor to the Galaxy S23.