Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 emerges as Qualcomm's alternative to outclass Mediatek

During a press conference held in Beijing, Qualcomm unveiled the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 mobile processor, designed to offer advanced AI experiences on mid-to-high-end devices.

This announcement takes on particular relevance for Qualcomm: while the cost of its top-of-the-range processor continues to increase, pushing many companies towards alternatives such as Mediatek chips and their Dimensity, the search for greater price competitiveness could be decisive for maintaining the company position on the market.

The integration of the new processor into Qualcomm's graphics and AI ecosystem reflects the company's broader strategy to promote the adoption of its frameworks and modelsfollowing a scheme similar to that adopted by NVIDIA with DLSS and CUDA.

Despite the “s” suffix, which might suggest a superior position, this model ranks just below the more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Less powerful, but not that much

The differences between Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 and 8 Gen 3 are mainly concentrated on production and architecture.
Both processors are manufactured with 5-nanometer technology from TSMC, but the 8s Gen 3 features a slightly different configuration, taking advantage of the new generation of Arm v9 cores to optimize the execution of on-device AI models.

The new processor has a super core with a frequency of 3.0 gigahertzslightly lower than the 3.3 GHz core of the 8 Gen 3.
The performance and efficiency cores have also been slightly reduced, in line with Qualcomm's goal of offering a more accessible variant of its top of the range, to attract a wider audience of consumers.

Despite this, the chip maintains high-level artificial intelligence capabilities, ensuring excellent photography and gaming performance.

The first phones to adopt this chip will be launched by brands like Xiaomi, Honor, iQOO, Realme and Redmidemonstrating a keen interest from the industry in this new technological solution.

A little clarity

From the previous generation, that of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 inherits the Adreno GPU with hardware ray tracing (without global illumination) and the memory controller with support for up to 24GB of LPDDR4X-8400, which offers a bandwidth of 67.2GB/s compared to 76.8GB/s of the higher-end model.

The Spectra ISP also seems to maintain a similar structure, although some limitations introduced by Qualcomm to differentiate the processors are evident, such as the absence of 8K recording and the lack of super slow motion at 720p@960 FPS, limiting itself to 1080p at 240 FPS.

The modem also suffers a reduction in performance, going from the X75 to the X70, with lower download speeds.

For end users, the differences between these two chips are minimal, but for companies, rather than opting for the previous year's processor for economic reasons, it becomes more convenient to adopt this new “middle ground”, which offers an improved CPU and a “newer name” with all the advantages of the case, while still keeping an acceptable expense.

It was initially thought that Qualcomm would also launch the chip Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3but this did not happen: according to the reports of some preliminary tests shared by technology vloggers, it seems that the 7+ Gen 3 is slower than the 8 Gen 2.

As a result, the Qualcomm smartphone chip hierarchy looks like this: with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at the top, followed by the 8s Gen 3, the 8 Gen 2, and the rumored 7+ Gen 3, in order.