Week 43 in review: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro are official

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset this week and phone makers queued up to declare their next flagship will have it - iQOO and Honor were among them. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is all about AI - the AI Engine supports multi-modal generative AI models and popular large language models for speech recognition - the chip can run up to 20 tokens per second for instant AI assistant responses. Qualcomm boasts that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 packs the world's fastest stable diffusion, which can generate an image in a fraction of a second.

In CPU terms the 4nm chipset promises to be 30% faster and 20% more efficient than Gen 2. The eight-core processor inside is highlighted by 1 Cortex-X4 prime core running up to 3.3 GHz, five performance cores at up to 3.2 GHz, and 2 efficiency cores clocked up to 2.3 GHz. There's LPDDR5x memory support up to 4800 MHz and up to 24 GB.

Qualcomm shared the reference benchmarks of the new SoC, too.

Xiaomi unveiled the Xiaomi 14 and 14 Pro - the first phones with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. They have 6.36-inch and 6.73-inch displays, a new 1/1.31" main sensor, 3.2x zoom cameras, and Xiaomi's new HyperOS. The pair is up for grabs in China with the global market eagerly anticipating a launch date.

We also saw the next generation ARM-based Qualcomm chip for PCs - the redesigned Snapdragon X Elite. It's fabbed on a 4nm process node and features 12 high-performance Oryon cores clocked at 3.8 GHz with single and dual-core boost up to 4.3 GHz. Qualcomm states that its new CPU matches competing Intel 13th gen CPUs on multi-threaded performance while drawing 68% less power. There’s a comparison to Apple’s ARM-based M2 chip with the Snapdragon X Elite claiming 50% faster peak multi-threaded performance.

Samsung's Galaxy S24 series will be "the smartest AI phones ever". The S24 series will allegedly have features very reminiscent of ChatGPT and Google's own Bard - such as the ability to create content and stories based on a few keywords you provide. Samsung has also designed some additional AI features like text-to-image Generative AI, which it already talked about during the announcement of the Exynos 2400 chipset, which will be powering the S24 series in some markets. Speech-to-text will be improved with AI too.

In more certain upgrades, Samsung confirmed that the Galaxy S24 series will support communication over satellite for emergencies.

That's it for this week - the full list of hot topics is below.