Qualcomm presented its new smartphone SoC Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at the Snapdragon Summit 2023. The chip replaces the SoC Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, is said to be 30 percent faster and has a 25 percent faster graphics unit that requires 25 percent less power.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a 1+5+3 Kryo core configuration and therefore one more performance core than last year’s model. The prime core is a Cortex-X4 with 3.3 GHz, the five performance cores are Cortex-A720 cores. Three of them are clocked at 3.2 GHz and two at 3 GHz. The two efficiency cores are Cortex-A520 refreshes with 2.3 GHz.
According to Qualcomm, the CPU is 20 percent more efficient than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The SoC has 12 MB of L3 cache and supports LPDDR5x memory at 4.8 GHz. The SoC has a hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which is said to be 98 percent faster than that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Stable diffusion image in less than a second
According to Qualcomm, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 it is possible to create an AI image with stable diffusion on the device in less than a second. The SoC’s AI engine is Qualcomm’s first to support multimodal AI models, including LLMs like 7B Llama 2, which can run up to 20 tokens per second. AI is also intended to improve conversation quality, and there are also new functions for taking photos.
With Photo Expansion, users of a smartphone with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can, for example, have image content generated using AI calculations when zooming out of a subject. In this way, a photo should have a larger focal length than when it was recorded – with content that the AI has generated and that does not exist in reality.
The new Video Object Eraser is also calculated using AI. This works like Google’s Magic Eraser and can make image content disappear – only not for photos, but for videos, which is much more complex. The AI segmentation of subjects when shooting introduced with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has been expanded to twelve levels.
Gaming at 240 fps
The chipset can handle gaming at up to 240 fps and supports Unreal Engine 5 Lumen, a real-time lighting system for games. The X75 modem built into the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 supports 10 Gbps in the downlink and 3.5 Gbps in the uplink. In addition to Wifi 7, the SoC supports Bluetooth version 5.4. LPDDR6X memory is supported up to 24 GB. The first smartphones with the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 are expected to appear in the coming weeks.
Qualcomm also introduced the new audio chips S7 Pro Sound Platform Gen 1 and S7 Sound Platform Gen 1. Qualcomm says it has improved the noise canceling, and a built-in micro-NPU is supposed to improve the sound. With the S7 Sound Platform, users should be able to listen to lossless music at 96 kHz for ten hours – with the S5 platform from last year it was ten hours of lossless music at 48 kHz.
Basically, the chips support lossless streaming up to 192 kHz. The Pro model uses Qualcomm’s new XPAN technology, which transmits signals to the smartphone via WiFi. This is intended to increase the range compared to pure Bluetooth connections. XPAN only works with Snapdragon Sound compatible devices.
Snapdragon Seamless for better device communication
With the new Snapdragon Seamless standard, devices with different Snapdragon chips should also be able to be used better with each other. Thanks to Seamless, for example, image content and files can be easily transferred from a smartphone with a Snapdragon chip to a notebook with a Snapdragon SoC. Phone calls can also be accepted directly from the computer and headphones can be easily switched between different devices.
Some device manufacturers already have such functions. Qualcomm explicitly does not see Seamless as an independent app, but as a software and hardware layer for manufacturers who can use it to improve their services. Partners include Microsoft, Lenovo and Android, among others.