The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is here to run AI on your next phone, whatever that means
Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui. The company paid for my trip to the island to check out the next platform that will power phones that will power the Galaxy S24the OnePlus 12and many more of the best phones we expect to see this in 2024. The fulcrum of the next-generation platform will be AI features, although it remains unclear what exactly those will be, which is exactly the point.
Current processing platforms, on most mobile devices and laptops, consist of the CPU for application processing and the GPU for graphics and specialized applications. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3just like the Google Tensor chipsets, has its own chipsets Neural processing unit, or NPU, which is designed to run machine learning (ML) applications and functions. However, unlike Google’s Tensor chipset, Qualcomm isn’t locking its NPU to one company’s ML features.
Machine learning is big for Qualcomm this year. Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses work with a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset with similar ML concepts. Microsoft has tested its Copilot AI software with Qualcomm’s next generation Snapdragon X Elite laptop chipset. Now, phone makers can bundle AI features into the device using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform
Qualcomm demonstrated the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset using the Stable Diffusion generative AI image engine to create a new image in less than one second based on a quick request, on a mobile device and not in the cloud. The Gen 3 chipset can use large language models (LLM) such as Meta’s Llama model to create generative text responses on the device using billions of possible instruction parameters.
Qualcomm said the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will be used in devices from manufacturers such as ASUS, Honor, iQOO, MEIZU, NIO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE. According to Qualcomm, the first devices will appear on the market in the coming weeks, and not months.
The above list excludes Samsung and Motorola (Lenovo). Does this mean those companies won’t use the next generation of Snapdragon? No. It means they didn’t want their names in this press release that would reveal details about new phones. Samsung and Motorola will make their own news, thank you very much, Qualcomm.
Will the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 help Android beat Apple?
The first phone to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platform won’t be a mystery, it will be the Xiaomi 14, and Xiaomi’s president William Lu was on hand to pre-announce the new phone for the next day. He explained that while it wasn’t labeled as a Pro device, we should expect top-notch performance from the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone.
Qualcomm also explained that Xiaomi would adopt all the technologies that Qualcomm is demonstrating at the Snapdragon Summit, including its generative AI features and new image editing features. That’s important, because while Qualcomm makes the chipset that makes these features possible, it’s the phone makers who decide what a phone can do.
For example, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can make an image twice larger. Using Stable Diffusion, it can zoom out on an image and create a new edge for the scene. If Samsung, OnePlus or Motorola don’t provide software to take advantage of the NPU engine, this zoom-out feature and all of Qualcomm’s suggested features will be dead on arrival and unavailable on your next phone.
The biggest question will be whether the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will ultimately outperform Apple’s own chipsets. Although Android phones used to be faster than Apple’s devices, ever since Apple started developing its own mobile processors and platforms, they have consistently outperformed the best Android phones in real-world benchmarks and tests.
When Qualcomm showed off its new laptop processor, the Snapdragon X Elite, it made it very clear that it had the Apple M2 laptop chip in its sights. There were no such calls when Qualcomm showed off its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chipset. We’ll have to get our hands on the top Gen 3 devices to test them for ourselves and see if the Snapdragon can finally beat the Bionic or even the newer A17 Pro.
There is no clear idea of ββwhat an AI phone will be
If you listen to Qualcomm, they like to tell you that they have been predicting AI on mobile devices for over five years. They will tell you that AI is the future of phones, and that every phone in the future will rely on AI. They just don’t want to tell you what that phone will look like.
At this point, AI seems to be a shortcut to even better features, and at worst a series of parlor tricks. Qualcomm showed us a demo phone that could use a time-of-flight sensor like the one on the Google Pixel 8 Pro And Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max (neither of which use Qualcomm Snapdragon), to determine the quality of the air. While a more advanced air quality sensor could do the same, by using machine learning models and the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm can accomplish this complex task using a simpler sensor and equipment.
Will air quality become an important feature of smartphones? No, but Qualcomm is at least showing the potential of machine learning. It’s up to developers and device manufacturers to decide which features to enable using machine learning. Unfortunately, this leaves us without a concrete future that we can anticipate.
When I asked Qualcomm people what the next generation of computers will look like, how I will actually start my day on the next generation of mobile devices compared to today, I got blank stares. They just don’t know. They know the potential of their chipset, but they haven’t unlocked it, and they don’t have a definitive path to get us to that future.