Excuse the blase headline denoting that Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 comes with the usual boosts in speed and power efficiency because this time around AI is front and center with its fingers in virtually every pie, including the addition of generative AI capabilities. But, just to reassure you, this third generation of the Snapdragon 8 series packs in in 30% more speed with is 20% more efficient than its predecessor which set the benchmarks for mobile performance during 2023.
With a Cortex-X4 prime core providing the high-performance, the chip also boasts five performance cores and 2 more cores on efficiency duty. Support for up to 24GB of LPDDR5x memory is present, and you’ll also find 6GHz Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Being a mobile processor it should come as no surprise that its X75 5G modem features both sub-6 GHz and mmWave antennas. Bluetooth 5.4 makes an appearance and there’s support for triple triple frequency satellite systems (GPS).
Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with its new Adreno GPU offers ‘console-defying’ gameplay with support for an incredible 240fps on displays with up to 240Hz. The 2nd-generation Adreno Frame Motion Engine aids smoother playback and there’s even on-chip support for the Unreal Engine 5.2 for the first time. Naturally, Ray Tracing is improved by 40% over what the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is capable of, and there’s also a new audio chip which can output 24-bit 96kHz lossles music – via Bluetooth no less.
“Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 infuses high-performance AI across the entire system to deliver premium-level performance and extraordinary experiences to consumers. This platform unlocks a new era of generative AI enabling users to generate unique content, help with productivity, and other breakthrough use cases.” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.”
Coming back to the new chip’s AI capabilities, Qualcomm’s AI Engine caters to on-device generative AI with support for multi-modal AI models, large language models (LLM), language vision models (LVM), and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) with up to 10 billion parameters. Again, it should be said that this is all on-device which is incredible. Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit) is 98% faster while the Sensing Hub’s performance has increased by 40%.
200 Mega-pixels is still the most mega-pixels that a singal camera sensor can support but there are also a bunch of new photography features which promise to revolutionize content capture:
- Video Object Eraser by Arcsoft for video capture removes unwanted people and objects at the tap of a finger
- Two always-sensing cameras in the front and back allow for easy QR code
scanning, face unlock, and more - Zoom Anyplace, powered by Samsung’s first 200 MP image sensor optimized
for Snapdragon, allows capture of multiple videos, object tracking, and 2x and
4x zoom—all in 4K - First HDR photo technology from Dolby enables capture and playback of
images with greater range of colors, tones, and shades to reflect the full
creative vision of the photographer - Truepic photo capture with C2PA standard support lets you snap a photo with
Truepic’s cryptographic seal to prove the photo is real and not generative AI - Vlogger’s View lets you share both your selfie camera and rear camera video
simultaneously, putting you in the action as you share and narrate - Photo Expansion intuitively extends a photo beyond what was capture
In a nutshell:
Our first AI Engine to support multi-modal generative AI models, including
popular large language models (LLM), language vision models (LVM), and
transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) up to 10B
parameters—solely on-device
- World’s fastest stable diffusion enables you to generate an image at a fraction
of a second; quickly generate multiple options to pick from or create various
social media posts in an instant - LLM models can run up to 20 tokens/sec*, one of the fastest in the smartphone
industry, so your personal AI assistant can respond to you swiftly - On-device personalization: Qualcomm® Sensing Hub can securely use your
data, like favorite activities, fitness level, and location, to make the AI virtual
assistant give you more personalized responses - Up to 98% faster Qualcomm® Hexagon™ NPU performance and up to 40%
performance/watt - Up to 3.5x AI performance increase on the Qualcomm Sensing Hub
We should see the first flagship handsets powered by the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset launch over the next few weeks.
