Qualcomm offers a potential fix if you’re not interested in a midrange smartphone but you also don’t want to pay premium costs. The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 CPU, which the company recently introduced, has flagship capabilities but performs marginally less than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
With one prime ARM Cortex X4 at 3.0GHz, four performance cores at 2.8GHz, and three efficiency cores at 2.0GHz, it is constructed on a 4-nanometer (nm) technology. This is comparable to the 1+5+2 Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 configuration, with the “s” model substituting an efficiency core for a performance core. Additionally, the flagship chip’s prime core operates at a slightly quicker 3.4 GHz.
The chip uses a previous-gen X70 5G modem, though it still offers Wi-Fi 7 support. You also get hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic gameplay.
There’s on-device multimodal generative AI that can run large language models (LLMs) with up to 10 billion parameters, meaning it’ll support model’s like Gemini Nano, along with AI assistants. However, it lacks some AI features found on the 8 Gen 3 chip. It also comes with the always-sensing ISP introduced with the last-gen Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip.
The new chip adds another sub-category to Qualcomm’s lineup, particularly if you count the last-gen chips still used in devices like the OnePlus 12R. The chip will appear in Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi and Xiaomi smartphones announced later this month — so it’ll be interesting to see how they’re priced compared to the flagship models.
