Snapdragon 8s Gen3 is Qualcomm’s first flagship killer with generative AI at the forefront

Qualcomm just unveiled its new high-end chip: it’s called Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 and it is the company’s first SoC specifically designed to optimize the performance of generative artificial intelligence directly on smartphones. It is the first mobile chip to focus so much on generative AI, but obviously it’s not just that: among other strong points, Qualcomm is betting on photography, gaming And audio.

Starting precisely from generative AI, i.e. the type of artificial intelligence that manages to generate content such as text and images (think of ChatGPT and MidJourney, for example): normally, we are used to thinking of this type of AI in the cloud, but it will always be It is more common to have processors capable of performing very complex operations locally.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 supports generative AI models with up to 10 billion parameters And multimodal models (i.e. based on different types of input and output, such as text, images, sounds, etc.).

Although at first it may not be easy to find concrete applications for this focus on generative AI, these characteristics will allow for software capable of generate text, audio or images directly from your smartphonewithout even needing to access the internet.

Additionally, Qualcomm demonstrated a practical example of generative AI with the photo expansion on-device: by selecting a photograph (which perhaps is in a different format than we would like) it is possible to “enlarge” the photo thanks to the AI, which will be able to generate an outline that integrates perfectly with the original photo.

As we have seen for the Galaxy S24 series, and as we expect from iOS 18, the massive use of artificial intelligence will be increasingly common on smartphones and Qualcomm has certainly not stood by and watched.

But obviously artificial intelligence is not enough, and among the other strengths of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 there are also photography, gaming, audio and connectivity.

Starting from the first, the chip integrates the latest technologies contained under the name of Snapdragon Sight.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 includes a triple 18-bit Spectra cognitive ISP which, in addition to all the shooting optimizations we are now accustomed to, also includes camera support always-sensing, which greatly speed up face unlock. The chip supports sensors up to 200 megapixels and includes real-time Semantic Segmentation technology, capable of identify up to 12 different layers (foreground, outline, background, etc) in photos, to optimize the shots.

Gamers will be able to benefit from all the technologies included in Snapdragon Elite Gaming, which bring the Ray Tracing with hardware acceleration in real time and support for displays with resolutions up to Quad HD+ and refresh rates up to 144 Hz.

For sound, Snapdragon Sound includes Qualcomm Aqstic Speaker Max technology which reduces sound distortion when audio is reproduced from the smartphone’s speakers, and then obviously there is support for aptX Lossless codecs and Low Energy Audio, with support to the Auracast audio broadcast.

Finally, as regards connectivity, Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 includes the Snapdragon X70 5G modem, with Wi-Fi 7 and download speeds of up to 5.8 Gbps.

We do not yet know the devices that will adopt Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, but Qualcomm has announced that this chip has already been chosen by several manufacturers including honoriQOO, realme, redmi And xiaomiand the first smartphone with this chip will arrive as early as this month March.