Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 To Make On-Device AI More Affordable

Smartphone being held up in front of a city landscape with a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip render on the display.
You may have noticed a persistent buzz surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, both on the hardware and software side. If not, we’ll send help removing you from under that boulder. Partially in an effort to make on-device AI more accessible, Qualcomm today announced its Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, which is the latest “s” addition to its mobile platform.

Not the least bit surprising, Qualcomm is quick to point out its latest platform’s AI chops as it looks to supercharge more mid-tier devices with highlights of the 7-series.

“The new platform offers on-device generative AI capabilities with support for LLMs including Baichuan-7B, Llama 2 at 1B parameters, and others. It also features new adventure-packed mobile gaming experiences powered by the powerful Qualcomm Adreno GPU, and professional-grade camera and video capture features such as 12-bit triple ISP and 4K sHDR,” Qualcomm says.

This looks to be a substantial upgrade over the previous generation Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. The new Gen 3 variant brings to the table a 1-3-4 configuration consisting of a single Cortex-A720 prime core clocked at 2.5GHz, three more Cortex-A720 performance cores clocked at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A520 efficiency cores clocked at 1.8GHz. What separates the prime and performance cores is a higher boost clock on the former.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 infographic.
Also notable is that Qualcomm has bumped the 7s platform’s architecture up to its Armv9 CPU cores, which should net improvements to IPC over the previous generation part. According to Qualcomm, it offers nearly 20% better CPU performance, up to 40% better GPU performance, and over 30% better AI performance, all while delivering power savings of up to 12%. Overall, the SoC is more comparable to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 than it is to the Snapdragon 7s Gen 2.

“Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 will bring the best of the 7-series to more mid-tier devices by selecting top 7-series features including on-device AI support,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “This platform is another proof point in our commitment to deliver the best-in-class mobile experiences to consumers at every price.”

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 also sports a Spectra image signal processor that supports camera configs with up three 21MP lenses, or a 32MP + 21MP dual camera setup, or up to a 64MP single camera, all at 30 FPS with zero-shutter lag.

5G cellular connectivity is also on tap here, with mmWave and sub-6GHz support. This is flanked by Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4 support to round out the wireless amenities.

Qualcomm says Xiaomi has called dibs on its new Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, with the first device expected next month. Sometime after, we’ll see players such as Realme and Sharp adopt Qualcomm’s latest SoC.