Qualcomm’s new 8S Gen 3 targets not-quite flagship phones

Is it precocious midrange? Is it lesser high-end? Hard to say. | Image: Qualcomm

Qualcomm conscionable launched a caller chipset that’s designed to beryllium conscionable beneath its existent flagship successful presumption of capabilities and price. The Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 aims to bring astir of the 8 Gen 3’s features — including enactment for on-device generative AI models — to much affordable phones. It represents a caller tier for the top-of-the-line 8-series chips, and it’s besides a small spot confusing.

Before we get into each that, let’s commencement with the straightforward stuff: the 8S Gen 3 includes a GPU akin to the modular 8 Gen 3, though it has 1 little show halfway and runs astatine a little frequence — the premier halfway runs astatine up to 3.0GHz versus 3.4GHz connected the 8 Gen 3. The caller 8S Gen 3 besides uses a previous-gen modem, the X70 5G, which includes Wi-Fi 7 support. There’s besides enactment for hardware-accelerated ray tracing truthful photorealistic games tally much smoothly, which seems to beryllium kind of a benchmark of telephone flagship-iness these days.

Naturally, there’s AI. The 8S Gen 3 supports multimodal generative AI on-device and tin tally ample connection models of up to 10 cardinal parameters — that includes the likes of Llama 2 and Gemini Nano. It doesn’t connection each of the AI capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but it does enactment gen AI virtual assistants and representation expansion.

The mode Qualcomm’s Deepu John, elder manager of merchandise management, explains it, each Snapdragon high-level tier tin beryllium breached down into 3 sub-categories. There are Snapdragon 8, 7, 6, and 4 bid chipsets, and wrong those, up to 3 antithetic offerings. This “S” bid spot sits conscionable beneath the modular 8 Gen 3, and if Qualcomm ever releases an 8 Plus Gen 3, it would beryllium connected top.

Got it? Great, it gets adjacent much confusing erstwhile you retrieve that telephone manufacturers are inactive utilizing 2022’s flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 successful not-quite flagship phones similar the OnePlus 12R. There’s besides the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 sitting conscionable beneath the 8S Gen 3, though it has lone turned up successful a fistful of phones. Qualcomm seems to beryllium slicing the high-end telephone marketplace awfully thin, possibly successful an effort to support OEMs from turning to MediaTek for their less-than-flagship devices.

In immoderate case, the 8S Gen 3 should commencement appearing connected the marketplace soon enough, though not successful devices readily sold successful the US. Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi person each said that they’ll beryllium utilizing the platform, with caller devices expected “in the coming months.”