If last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was any indication of what's to come, it was evident that AI or Artificial Intelligence will be at the top of Qualcomm's priorities for its next flagship mobile chipset. Enter the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the company's latest top-tier chipset that was unveiled today at the Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Hawaii. The generative AI revolution you've been expecting from 2024 Android flagships? This is what's going to make that happen.
The Qualcomm AI Engine for the TSMC-made 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was developed with a singular focus on generative AI to bring new use cases to life. It supports multi-modal generative AI models to deliver new experiences based on voice, text, and image inputs.
2024 Android flagships get new generative AI features thanks to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
On-device personalization gets a boost with the up to 3.5x AI performance increase on the Qualcomm Sensing Hub. This means that assistants like Bixby and Google Assistant will be able to better utilize your preferences to provide better personalized responses. The improved Hexagon NPU boasts up to 98% faster performance as well.
Qualcomm claims a 30% performance bump for the CPU alongside a 20% improvement in power efficiency. The Kryo CPU has one Arm Cortex-X4-based prime core at up to 3.3GHz, 100MHz faster than last year's chipset. The five performance cores, that's one more than last year for those keeping count, at up to 3.2GHz and the two efficiency cores at 2.3GHz are all between 400 and 300MHz faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Evidently, the new chipset packs a mean punch.
Improving the gaming experience on mobile device was another area of focus for Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It claims that the updated Adreno GPU is 25% faster and equally as efficient. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing, last year's addition, gets improved with Global Illumination and Unreal Engine 5 support. Mobile gamers will particularly appreciate the support for 240fps gaming.
Snapdragon Game Super Resolution can upscale games to 8K, though with on-device display support capped at 4K @ 60 Hz, the full potential of this can't be realized on the device itself. However, a neat little detail from the spec sheet reveals that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 supports USB version 3.1 Gen 2 which provides a maximum bandwidth of 10Gbps, much like the USB controller of Apple's A17 Pro. This means that Android flagship phones powered by the new chipset can be hooked up to an external monitor for gaming at full 8K resolution.
Even last year's chipset had 8K video capture support but now this makes it possible for you to connect the phone to a compatible display and play back the videos captured in 8K. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also powers some creative AI camera tools, such as the ability to expand a photo beyond what was captured, generate backgrounds and even remove objects from videos. Samsung's first 200MP image sensor optimized for Snapdragon enables Zoom Anyplace, a feature that lets you capture multiple videos, track objects and zoom in 2x and 4x in 4K. General improvements to Qualcomm's Cognitive ISP will make it possible to capture more detailed, accurate, and vibrate photos and videos.
On the audio side, Snapdragon Sound with new the Qualcomm Expanded Personal Area Network Technology delivers uninterrupted lossless audio when you're aware from the device or moving across rooms. It also syncs gameplay sound to the millisecond, ensuring that you experience no lag in audio. The chipset supports 24-bit 96 kHz lossless music over Bluetooth as well.
It's hardly a surprise that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 boasts Qualcomm's next-generation X75 5G modem that supports downlink speeds of up to 10Gbps and up to 3.5Gbps uplink. 5G multi-SIM support means you can use multiple 5G networks at the same time. Wi-Fi 7 support, first seen on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 last year, is the fastest yet with up to 5.8Gbps speeds.
Qualcomm has confirmed that a whole host of device partners will be using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in their flagship handsets. Samsung is missing from this list but even as we know the Exynos chipset is making a return with the Galaxy S24 series, there's no cause for alarm. There will be Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered variants of the Galaxy S24 as well. Some of you may recall that last year's announcement of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 didn't mention Samsung either. That's because Qualcomm announced a slightly overclocked Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy when Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S23 series in February this year.
So while the company hasn't confirmed this yet, we'll likely see a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy being unveiled just before the Galaxy S24's launch. That means there's a bit more power to be extracted from this chipset and Qualcomm will do so for the iteration that goes in Samsung's next-generation flagship line. It's going to be an interesting matchup between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and the Exynos 2400, and so far, Qualcomm seems to have knocked it out of the park once again.
Disclaimer: Qualcomm is hosting a large group of international media for the Snapdragon Summit 2023 from October 24-26 in Hawaii, including SamMobile. All opinions and analyses remain our own with Qualcomm receiving no advance preview or exercising any control over our coverage.
