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Snapdragon 8s Gen 3: Cheaper but almost as powerful
Qualcomm hasn't played around much with its chips in recent years. The last three generations have always been enriched with Plus (+) models, and in the last year we have also seen models with an additional "s" designation, such as the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. The Plus designation indicates slightly faster cores, perhaps support for larger RAM configurations -a and the like. The "s" designation means that it is a processor that is caught between the previous and the current generation. It has the features of both, the only question is how much of the features have been picked up from the newer processor.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is the latest of its kind, but it hasn't been built into any phone yet. That's expected to happen in the coming months, though there aren't any major phone releases until then. Towards the end of the summer, a new generation of foldable phones from Samsung and Honor are coming, and in September, a new generation of Xiaomi T phones. The latter may have the greatest potential to incorporate these new chips, as they are high-midrange phones that are also caught between the lower midrange (up to around 500 euros) and premium (over 1000 euros).
The 8s Gen 3 is a 4nm chip with a main Cortex-X4 core at 3.0GHz, four powerful cores at 2.8GHz and three efficient cores at 2.0GHz. It supports up to 24 GB of LPDDR5x memory (up to 4200 MHz) and UFS 4.0 memory. It uses USB 3.1 Gen 2 over USB-C for connectivity. Judging by these features, it's not just a cut-down version of the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, or the consumption of chip stocks that didn't meet the strict standards for the new chip, which is encouraging. It has a lower clocked Cortex-X4 core, but also 4 large cores and 3 small cores in a 1+4+3 configuration. The original 8 Gen 3 chip is in a 1+5+2 configuration.
RAM support is more similar to last year's 8 Gen 2, and the older Snapdragon X70 5G modem is also included (instead of the X75). However, Qualcomm says the 8s Gen 3 implements 3GPP Release 17 and 5G power saving, which is not found in the older chip. In any case, the chip is ready for the new Wi-Fi 7 standard.
It should also be good at AI tasks. It has a built-in AI chip for these types of scenarios, something we didn't see with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It will certainly be less powerful than the latest chip, but still fast enough to run Gemini, Llama 2 and the like.
For gaming, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 (SM8635) is equipped with a powerful Adreno 735 graphics processor. It also supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing. Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 can double the frame rate without additional power consumption, and Snapdragon Game Super Resolution adds dots to the picture without additional load.
In short, on paper a very solid chip that we will definitely test by the end of this year.
