Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 with Minor Spec Downgrades

Qualcomm has introduced a new chipset in the top-tier 8 series segment. The new Snapdragon “8s” Gen 3 chipset arrives as a slimmed-down variant of the current-gen flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It is quite similar to 8 Gen 3, however, there are some minor downgrades.

The American chip maker said the new flagship 8 Gen 3 chipset has been carved out to enhance the “performance to price ratio,” likely referring to a price reduction of 8 series chipsets with some compromises. Qualcomm says the new SoC brings “specially selected Snapdragon experiences.”

The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 features eight Kryo CPU cores and is likely built on TSMC’s 4nm process node. It packs a single Cortex-X4 prime core clocked at a maximum frequency of 3.0GHz.

In addition, there are 4x performance cores (Cortex-A720) clocked at 2.8GHz and 3x efficiency cores (Cortex-A520) clocked at 2.0GHz. All three cores on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 have slightly lower clock speeds (up to 400MHz) compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

The GPU has also seen a minor downgrade. It uses an underclocked Adreno GPU (likely Adreno 735) that comes with several high-end gaming features, including real-time HW-accelerated Ray Tracing, Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0, Shadow Denoiser, and more.

On the other hand, the Hexagon NPU on board is capable of running smaller AI models up to 10B parameters. Qualcomm has not put out the TOPS figure for the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3.

As for the camera, there is still support for Cognitive ISP featuring triple 18-bit ISPs. It also gets support for real-time semantic segmentation for both photos and videos. It can capture photos up to 200MP, and with zero-shutter lag (ZSL), it can capture photos up to 108MP in single-camera mode.

There is also support for dual (64+36) and triple cameras (36+36+36) with ZSL. Not to forget, the chip maker has included support for Google Ultra HDR photo capture as well.

On the video front, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 can record 4K HDR videos at 60 FPS. It brings features such as Bokeh Engine 2, Snapdragon Low Light Vision (LLV), noise reduction, Super Resolution, Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and more.

Coming to connectivity on the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, the chipset supports Wi-Fi 7 (with peak speeds up to 5.8Gbps), Bluetooth 5.4, and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE). It also packs an older Snapdragon X70 5G modem from Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, released in 2022.

Next, the chipset can be paired with up to UFS 4.0 storage and LPDDR5X RAM (speed up to 4200 MHz). Finally, you get AV1 decoding support, but not encoding, and there is NavIC support in tow.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 Specifications

Here are the key specifications of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. You can go through the table below and find all the information.

Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 Upcoming Smartphones

Qualcomm says Snapdragon 8s Gen 3-powered smartphones by Xiaomi, Redmi, realme, iQOO, and HONOR will be released in the coming months. There are already rumors that Realme GT Neo 6, Redmi Note 13 Turbo, iQOO Neo 9, and Xiaomi Civi 4 would feature the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset. Check out upcoming smartphones from our dedicated Beebom Gadgets website below.