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.
