In terms of general performance, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 brings up to 30 percent higher CPU performance with 20 percent better power efficiency. The GPU has a 25 percent higher performance and 40 percent better ray tracing, while also maintaining 25 percent better power efficiency. Qualcomm did not stop there as it claims up to 10 percent overall power savings from other factors. AI is up to 98 percent faster with up to 40 percent better performance per watt, all thanks to the new Hexagon NPU.

“Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 infuses high-performance AI across the entire system to deliver premium-level performance and extraordinary experiences to consumers. This platform unlocks a new era of generative AI enabling users to generate unique content, help with productivity, and other breakthrough use cases.” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Each year, we set out to design leading features and technologies that will power our latest Snapdragon 8-series mobile platform and the next generation of flagship Android devices. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 delivers.”

In terms of specifications, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 gets a standard octa-core CPU design, with a single Prime Cortex-X4 core running at 3.3GHz, five Performance cores running at up to 3.2GHz, and two Efficiency cores running at up to 2.3GHz. It has 12MB of L3 cache and supports up to 24GB of 4800MHz LPDDR5x memory.

Qualcomm did not share a lot of information about its Adreno GPU inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but we do know it does real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing with global illumination, and does it much faster compared to its predecessor. It also has support for Unreal Engine 5 Lumen global illumination and reflections systems, new Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, and Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 features. It supports all modern APIs, HDR, has hardware-accelerated decoding, and will support up to 4K at 60Hz and QHD+ at 144Hz displays with variable refresh rate.

As most things are now about AI, Qualcomm was keen to note that the new Hexagon NPU brings significant improvements, with support for multi-modal generative AI models, including popular large language models (LLM), language vision models (LVM), and transformer network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) up to 10B parameters—solely on-device. It also can run up to 20 tokens/sec for LLM models, and its own Qualcomm Sensing Hub can further increase the AI performance by up to 3.5x.

The Spectra ISP has triple 18-bit SIPs with support for up to 200MP photo capture, has AI-based face detection, AI for 3A (auto-focus, autoexposure, and auto-white balance), can do 8K HDR video capture at 30fps or 4K at 120fps, and has plenty of other improvements. The same goes for the new Snapdragon Sound™ with new Qualcomm® Expanded Personal Area Network Technology (XPAN) with support for 24-bit 96 kHz lossless music over Bluetooth® wireless technology.

The connectivity comes from Snapdragon X75 modem-RF system and Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 Mobile Connectivity System, with 5G AI tensor hardware accelerator, for up to 10Gbps download and up to 3.5Gbps upload, WiFi 7 support, and Bluetooth 5.4.

While no specific dates were mentioned, Qualcomm did list all the global OEMs and smartphone makers that are working on their own flagship smartphones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, including ASUS, Honor, iQOO, MEIZU, NIO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.