Qualcomm Introduces Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, Slotting Below The Flagship SoC

Qualcomm Introduces Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, Slotting Below The Flagship SoC

As teased by Qualcomm last week, the mobile chipmaker has finally made it official – meet the new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, which brings the features of the flagship 8 Gen 3 “to more Android flagship smartphones.” Following the Snapdragon ‘7s’ nomenclature, the new 8s Gen 3 is designated to slot below the 8 Gen 3.

The biggest difference on the spec sheet is the CPU part of the entire SoC (System-on-a-Chip). The 8 Gen 3 consists of one Prime core at 3.4GHz (3.3GHz for select models), five Performance cores at 3.2GHz, and two Efficiency cores at 2.3GHz; whereas the new 8s Gen 3 is geared towards better power efficiency with a different core configuration and lower clock speeds, featuring one 3.0GHz Prime core, four 2.8GHz Performance cores, and three 2.0GHz Efficiency cores.

Aside from that, the 8s Gen 3 also jettisoned some of the leading-edge features, including 8K HDR video capture, 960FPS slow-motion capture, and 4K120 video capture. The onboard 5G modem is also downgraded to Snapdragon X70 5G Modem-RF, though you can still get a theoretical max download speed of 5Gbps – half the bandwidth offered by the X75 5G on the full-fat SD8G3. That said, Wi-Fi 7 support is identical on both SoCs. Memory support is also dropped from LPDDR5X-9600 to LPDDR5X-8400.

Major OEMs including HONOR, iQOO, realme, Redmi and Xiaomi will be releasing models featuring this SoC, with the first models expected to arrive within this month. 

Pokdepinion: I expect this chip to power a class of “value flagship” smartphones.