Qualcomm introduces the new “Snapdragon 8s Gen 3”, a special version of the flagship SoC, focusing on mid-range phones.
Qualcomm's newest smartphone SoC is the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3. Years of iPhone "S" upgrades might lead you to assume this is an interim refresh of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is a "specially designed" version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That means it's a slightly slower, cheaper chip than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is still Qualcomm's best smartphone chip
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The older, better Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has one 3.3 GHz “Prime” Arm Cortex X4 core, five “mid-range” A720 cores (three at 3.2 GHz, two at 2.0 GHz), and two “small” A520 cores at 2.3 GHz for background processing. This new “S” chip replaces one mid-range core with a smaller one, for a 1+4+3 arrangement instead of 1+5+2. All cores have lower operating frequencies: 3 GHz for the Prime core, 2.8 GHz for all mid-range cores, and 2 GHz for the small-range cores.
The modem is lower spec, having an X70 instead of an X75 on the 8 Gen 3 chip. This theoretically means a lower maximum download speed (5Gbps instead of 10), but since you would really need to get those speeds from your provider, it’s not clear if anyone will ever notice. The X70 also seems to consume more power, as it only has “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 3” instead of “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 4” on the chip. We don’t think Qualcomm has ever given a technical explanation for what this means, though. The SoC is still on 4nm, just like the 8 Gen 3. The maximum video resolution is now 4K instead of 8K.
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Qualcomm says that the “Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will be adopted by major OEMs, including Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi, with commercial devices expected to be announced in the coming months.” That should give you an idea of where this chip is headed: the “budget flagship” phones that are popular with Chinese manufacturers.
Source of information: arstechnica.com
