Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC for next-gen premium smartphones

US-based chipmaker Qualcomm on Tuesday announced its latest flagship mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm said it is its first mobile platform focusing on generative AI, with support for multi-modal generative AI models, including popular large language models (LLMs).

Featuring the Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), Qualcomm said the chip is capable of running games at 240 frames per second on supported displays. The chip supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, like the previous generation chip, with global illumination a new addition. Paired with Adreno GPU, Qualcomm said the chip is more efficient than the previous Gen 2 chip.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3: Details

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC boasts an AI engine, with genAI capabilities for stable diffusion for image generation. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform is based on 4nm processing technology. It has a new Kryo CPU, which the company said delivers up to 30 per cent more performance and 20 per cent more efficient rates compared to its predecessor. Besides, the CPU comes with five performance cores, up to 3.2 GHz, and two efficiency cores, up to 2.3 GHz.

Qualcomm said the chip can deliver high-end gaming performance, featuring hardware-accelerated ray tracing with global illumination. The Adreno GPU is said to be 25 per cent faster and more efficient, supporting 240 fps gaming on supported displays.

For cameras, the chip is powered by AI capabilities. The chip boasts a “Video Object Eraser” by Arcsoft that would allow OEMs and smartphone makers to implement features that would let users remove unwanted elements and people from videos.

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For connectivity, it boasts the Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 System with support for Wi-Fi 7 802.11be, 802.11ax, 802.11ac, 802.11a/b/g/n, and Bluetooth 5.4. The chip also supports 24-bit 96 kHz lossless music over Bluetooth, USB Version 3.1 Gen 2, USB Type-C, and UFS 4.0 storage.