Tech
Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 8s Gen 3: Focus on On-Device AI
Qualcomm officially revealed the existence of a new edition to its list as it announced the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 smartphone chipset, which consists of a few flagship features.
Qualcomm is all set to expand its chipset area by debuting its forthcoming Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 as a dedicated smartphone chipset along with some flagship-level features, but the noticeable fact that below the 8 Gen 3.
The Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is based on a 4nm process along with a 1+4+3 core configuration. It includes the essential parts, which are mentioned below:
- One prime ARM Cortex X4 clocked at 3.0 GHz
- Four Performance Cores (2.8 GHz)
- Three efficient cores (2.0 GHz)
This Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is quite different from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s 1+5+2, which swaps an efficiency core for another performance core. It appears that Qualcomm frames the 8s Gen 3 as featuring “specially curated” or selected flagship features.
The brand has offered support for on-device generative AI, such as Gemini Nano, though the same large language and vision models with at least 10 billion parameters would run faster on the 8 Gen 3.
Apart from all this, the brand is also offering an always-sensing ISP that permits real-time semantic segmentation to identify up to 12 layers in photos as well as videos such as faces, hair, clothes, and more. Jumping on the next, which is gaming, connectivity through the support of its X70 in place of the X75, audio.
Some of the smartphone brands will power their devices with the same chipset—the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3—in the future months, such as Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi.
Google’s Android ecosystem is always reliable for users, whether it comes to customization or availability, but it sometimes lacks in the security department. However, the company is improving in this department, and over the years, it has been dedicatedly working towards it. Now a new report also specifies the improvement.
Google has recently published a post where it shared details about the encounter with the application that hasn’t followed the terms and conditions of the Play Store.
According to the report, Google has detected 2.28 million apps that have violated the rules, and therefore, the developers are not able to publish them on the Play Store. This is all possible due to the company’s continuous effort, which developed the mechanism.
Along with this, there are almost 200000 applications detected that did not follow the rules and did not guarantee the correct use of sensitive permissions, and there are more than 330000 accounts that were banned for violations that were severe and repeated or the presence of malware in published apps.
In a recent report, the company also mentioned that there are almost 1.5 million old applications that lack the support of the recent APIs, and therefore they are not available for users who are using the latest version of Android. Additionally, Google Play Protect and real-time app scanning have allowed the Mountain View giant to identify over 5 million dangerous applications that are downloaded unofficially. For more information, you can read the full official post via this link.
Google and Samsung are coming together as their partnership goes beyond Android. On one side, Pixel smartphone devices use Samsung-manufactured Tensor chips; on the other hand, Smsung’s flagship Galaxy smartphones have AI features, like Circle to Search, noticeably before even the Pixel 8 series got this novelty.
In the report it is being unveiled, Rick Osteroh, SVP of platforms and devices at Google, stated that the brand’s “partnership has never been stronger.” A post on X shared by @rosterloh pointed to a positive meeting between TM Roh and @SamsungMobile leadership. It highlights a strong partnership between both and excitement about future collaborations, particularly in the area of AI.
Following the statement, he also attached a selfie with TM Roh, president and head of MX Business at Samsung Electronics.
Then, @SamsungMobile reposted Osterloh’s post and teased that both brands are actively working on expanding the functionalities of AI features for Android and Galaxy devices to enhance Galaxy experiences.
Google has already announced at the last Galaxy Unpacked event, back in January in San Jose, that the Samsung Galaxy S24 series will use Gemini AI models to power the forthcoming AI capabilities in the applications and services built by the Korean giant. The brand also brought new functionalities for Google Messages and Android Auto, powered by Gemini Nano.
For enhancing the summarizing facility, Samsung’s Smarter Notes, Voice Recorder, and Keyboard applications use the AI model Gemini Pro, whereas the Galaxy S24 series smartphones use Imagen 2 text-to-image technology to offer “Generative Edit” features in the Gallery application for upgrading photo editing.
Finally, Qualcomm has debuted its new ARM-based processor, the Snapdragon X Plus, designed for laptops. We anticipate Samsung to incorporate this chipset into its upcoming laptops.
However, this new chipset appears a bit below the company’s high-end laptop chipset, the Snapdragon X Elite, which was unveiled a few months ago and is expected to be used in Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy Book 4 Edge.
The Snapdragon X Plus is a 4nm chip with a 10-core CPU. The Snapdragon X Elite and this newly launched chipset use the same Oryon CPU cores. This chipset is expected to be used in more affordable laptops running on the Windows OS. The CPU of this chipset operates at 3.4GHz, while the Snapdragon X Elite clocks at 3.8GHz.
Snapdragon X Plus’ integrated Adreno GPU has 3.8 TFLOPS of power, which could be equivalent to the Intel Core Ultra 7 series. The noticeable thing that remained constant in this new chipset is its NPU, which still offers 45 TOPS performance for on-device AI inference, similar to the Snapdragon X Elite.
This qualifies the chip as an AI chip, according to Microsoft Copilot’s minimum requirement of 40 TOPS. The brand has assured that the Snapdragon X Plus delivers 10% faster CPU performance than Apple’s M3 chipset while running at the same power. On the other hand, the Snapdragon chip claims to be 37% faster at the same wattage as the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. This chip is expected to appear in laptops and will debut in the second half of this year.
Previously, Samsung has used Qualcomm’s top-of-the-line and mid-range Snapdragon chipset in its ARM laptops, and the giant has already unveiled that the forthcoming Galaxy Book 4 Edge will use the Snapdragon X Elite. Given this fact, it is quite possible that the brand could launch a more affordable Galaxy Book 4 series laptop with the Snapdragon X Plus.