Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 unveiled: a chipset for near-top smartphones
With the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, Qualcomm has presented a slightly weakened version of its current top chip. The new chip is likely to be used primarily in cheaper versions of the top smartphones.
In future, you will have to look a little closer at the data sheet of a smartphone. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) that differs from Qualcomm's current top chipset by just one letter. According to the manufacturer, the aim is to offer a more affordable smartphone chip, but one that belongs to the Snapdragon 8 family - which looks better on the data sheet than a Snapdragon 7.
Weakened version of the top chipset
The CPU of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is manufactured using the 4-nanometre process, just like its big brother. There are differences in the distribution of the eight processing cores and their clock rates. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has one more performance core and clocks up to 0.3 GHz higher.
With the X70 5G, Qualcomm uses the cellular modem from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which already supports Wi-Fi 7, but only offers half the downlink of the previous year's SoC at 5 Gbit/s. The Adreno 735 graphics chip is also based on the architecture of the top chipset from 2023. You still don't have to do without hardware-based ray tracing with the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 - but you do have to do without ray tracing with global illumination and support for Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen Global Illumination.
Qualcomm takes over the image processor from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but removes video functions. Specifically, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 lacks AI-supported RAW noise reduction for night vision videos, 4K recordings with 120 FPS and 8K HDR support.
Source: Qualcomm
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is said to be just as suitable for AI on smartphones as the top model. It is said to be ready for Large Language Models with up to 10 billion parameters, namely Llama 2 from Meta and Gemini Nano from Google.
Chinese manufacturers back the chip
Qualcomm places the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. It could be a reaction to the fact that more and more manufacturers have recently been using chipsets from Mediatek for the cheaper versions of their top smartphones.
According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will be used by Xiaomi, Honor, Realme and iQOO, among others. The corresponding smartphones will be presented in the coming months. <p
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As a primary school pupil, I used to sit in a friend's living room with many of my classmates to play the Super NES. Now I get my hands on the latest technology and test it for you. In recent years at Curved, Computer Bild and Netzwelt, now at Digitec and Galaxus.