Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset brings AI capabilities to mid-range smartphones

On-device AI capabilities seem to be all the rage with smartphones right now. Qualcomm was the first to bring it to smartphones, with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. The chipset powers several flagship phones, including the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the OnePlus 12, and the Xiaomi 14 series.

And now, barely five months later, Qualcomm is taking things one step further with its newest Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. This new chip essentially sits between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and is also the first “8s” series chipset for smartphones.

AI features on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3

The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 gets support for several Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Baichian-7B, Llama 2, and Google’s Gemini Nano. It can handle any on-device AI model trained on up to 10 billion parameters. Qualcomm also says that their new SoC can generate text, as well as images, using textual or image prompts.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3: Performance and connectivity

Now, coming to performance. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a 4nm octa-core chipset, with one prime core which is clocked at 3GHz, four performance cores with a clock speed of 2.8GHz, and three efficiency cores clocked at 2GHz. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, to remind you, runs at up to 3.4GHz and also gets one more performance core.

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The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset also gets support for up to 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM with up to 4200MHz, and UFS 4.0 storage. The chipset also gets an X70 5G modem-RF system with support for speeds of up to 5Gbps. Connectivity options on the chipset include support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3: Graphics

Coming to graphics, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 comes with an Adreno GPU, which supports real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing. However, it does not get global illumination capabilities, like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 does. What it does get though, is support for a 4K resolution at 60fps, or a 2K resolution display with a refresh rate of up to 144Hz.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3: Camera support

The chipset supports cameras of up to 200MP and gets 4K recording capabilities at up to 60fps. However, it does miss out on 8K video recording capabilities. What’s cool though, is that there is AI support here as well, with an 18-bit triple cognitive ISP, which is capable of image expansion beyond its borders.

Which phones will get the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3?

Qualcomm has confirmed that the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will first feature in an upcoming Xiaomi smartphone. Other brands such as Realme and Redmi have also been confirmed to be launching phones featuring the chipset in the coming months.

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The chipset brings on-device AI capabilities to the mid-range and premium segment smartphones, which sit just below flagship offerings powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.