Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 undercuts the company's flagship SoC

Qualcomm's latest smartphone is a SoC Snapdragon 8s third generation. Years of iPhone “S” upgrades might lead you to assume this was a mid-cycle refresh for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is “Specially curated“Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Edition. This means it's a slightly slower and cheaper chip than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is still Qualcomm's best smartphone chip.

The older, better Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has a core design consisting of a 3.3GHz Arm Cortex Hz A520. Cores for background processing. This new “S” chip swaps a medium core for a small core, creating 1+4+3 instead of 1+5+2. Everything was clocked lower, too: 3GHz for the main core, 2.8GHz for all the medium cores, and 2GHz for the small cores.

The modem has been downgraded to Anyone would ever notice that. The X70 also appears to be more power-hungry, since it only has “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 3” instead of “Qualcomm 5G PowerSave Gen 4” on the main chip. We don't think Qualcomm has given a technical explanation of what this means at all. It's still a 4nm SoC, just like the 8th gen 3G. The video now reaches 4K resolution instead of 8K.

“Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 will be certified by major OEMs including Honor, iQOO, realme, Redmi, and Xiaomi, with commercial device announcements expected in the coming months,” Qualcomm says. This should tell you where this segment is headed: the “budget flagship” phones that are popular with Chinese OEMs.