Qualcomm has announced its latest flagship-tier mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 delivers new generative AI features, 240fps mobile gaming and studio-quality lossless audio, and is expected to power a large number of high-end smartphones over the next year. But, how does it compare to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2?
We’ve rounded up the major differences between these two mobile platforms.
Qualcomm focuses on generative AI this year
Qualcomm has dedicated a lot of attention to one of the biggest buzzwords of 2023 when creating the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That is, generative AI.
The Qualcomm AI Engine in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the company’s first AI Engine to support multi-modal generative AI models – including large language models, language vision models and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition – all on-device.
This means the chipset can generate images in a fraction of a second, large language models can run up to 20 tokens/sec allowing your AI assistant to answer you more quickly and performance is faster across the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU and Qualcomm Sensing Hub, too.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is more powerful than its predecessor
When it comes to sheer performance, Qualcomm’s Kryo CPU reaches new heights on the Snapdragon Gen 3 with five gold performance cores and 2 efficiency cores instead of the four performance cores and three efficiency cores on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
This allows for 30% better performance and 20% better power efficiency, while the upgraded Qualcomm Adreno GPU offers 25% better performance and 25% better power efficiency.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a smarter camera
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 includes the “world’s smartest AI-powered camera”, according to Qualcomm.
The Cognitive ISP announced on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 now lets users capture unique content with generative AI voice-activated photo and video editing, while the camera supports up to 12 layers of Semantic Segmentation for more detailed and accurate images.
The camera also supports AI-powered editing tools, including the Video Object Eraser by Arcsoft to move unwanted people and objects and Photo Expansion to extend a photo beyond what has been captured.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 supports 240fps gaming
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also includes mobile gaming upgrades, including support for smooth, lag-free 240fps gaming on 240Hz displays.
Other gaming features powered by Snapdragon Elite Gaming include Hardware-Accelerated Ray Tracing – this time 40% better and with support for Global Illumination – and Snapdragon Game Super Resolution to upscale game scenes for up to 8K external displays.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 offers faster connections
According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 includes the first 5G modem with an integrated AI tensor hardware accelerator for better speeds, coverage, mobility, link robustness and location accuracy.
The chipset also has the only Wi-Fi system to support High Band Simultaneous Multi-Link for speedy, low-latency performance.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
