Snapdragon Tech Summit 2023, held in Maui in October, was dominated by one word: AI. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 launched with on-device generative AI as its headline feature, and for the first time a Snapdragon chip could run multimodal large language models — including a version of Meta’s Llama 2 — entirely offline, with no cloud dependency.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is built on TSMC’s 4nm process and features the Hexagon NPU with 98 TOPS of AI performance — a generational leap over the Gen 2. The prime Cortex-X4 core clocks at 3.3GHz, and the Adreno 750 GPU adds advanced mesh shading and improved ray tracing. Insider content published around the Summit gave community members detailed architecture breakdowns that rival anything in technical journalism.
The Galaxy S24 series became the first major device to ship with the 8 Gen 3 globally, bringing Samsung Circle to Search, Live Translate, and Galaxy AI features powered directly by the Hexagon NPU. Qualcomm’s Insider briefings covered the inference stack, how LoRA-based fine-tuning worked on-device, and the memory bandwidth requirements for running billion-parameter models.
The 8 Gen 3 wasn’t just another annual refresh. It was the moment on-device AI shifted from concept to shipping product. qualcomm.com