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.
