Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 officially. See what your next smartphone will be capable of

Qualcomm has shown its most powerful chipset in history. The goal is to transfer generative artificial intelligence from the cloud to smartphones.

Let's start with the numbers, which in the case of this generation seem to have secondary importance. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was built using a 4-nanometer lithographic process based on:

• 1 ultra-efficient Cortex-X4 core clocked at 3.3 GHz;
• 3 efficient Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 3.2 GHz;
• 2 efficient Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 3 GHz;
• 2 energy-efficient Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz;
• an Adreno graphics unit with an undisclosed designation.

Compared to the previous generation, Qualcomm has refreshed its architecture and increased the timing of all cores. Their arrangement has also changed from 1-2-2-3 to 1-3-2-2. It remains to be seen how reducing the number of energy-saving A5xx cores will affect the battery life.

Qualcomm declares that compared to the "two", Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 provides:

• 30 percent more efficient and 20 percent more energy-efficient CPU
• 25 percent more efficient and 25 percent more energy-efficient GPU;
• 98 percent more efficient NPU.

Qualcomm asserts that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was designed with generative artificial intelligence in mind, which can be run directly on the device. The company has even prepared several ready-made solutions that manufacturers can implement in their own smartphones.

During the presentation, it was announced, among other things, the ability to generate images based on verbal descriptions, remove unwanted objects from movies, or "unzooming" photos. Qualcomm demonstrated a feature that, when zooming out a photo, can fill in the missing parts of the frame.

Smartphones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will also be able to natively run text-based assistants similar to ChatGPT or better synthesize human speech.

I personally suspect that these types of on-device functions will not work as well as their counterparts operating in powerful cloud computing systems, but Qualcomm emphasizes that the advantage of its technology is a greater emphasis on privacy. All the AI magic is supposed to happen directly on your smartphone, which eliminates the risk of, for example, leaking private photos.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 also utilizes Truepic certification for digital marking of non-AI-generated content. This makes it easier for social media services and other platforms to distinguish real photos from those produced by the machine.

Right after the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 presentation, it was officially confirmed that it would power the Xiaomi 14 series smartphones, which are set to be introduced on October 26th.

A Qualcomm representative mentioned that the Xiaomi 14 will utilize "all the presented AI features." Although its premiere is currently planned in China only, we will soon see what the flagships for the year 2024 will be capable of.