In the coming weeks and months, several smartphone brands will talk about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chipset, which appears to be going the same way as Google’s Tensor G3 — the ability to handle on-device generative AI.

The 8 Gen 3 supports a chatbot trained on Meta’s Llama 2 and it can accept text, image, and voice input. The AI Engine on the chipset aids multi-modal generative AI models and what Qualcomm claims is the world’s fastest Stable Diffusion system that can generate an image in under a second (compared to the 10-15 seconds we are used to). Being able to handle generative AI requests on-device means better privacy.

The Qualcomm Sensing Hub will reportedly deliver an AI performance increase of up to 3.5 times that of Qualcomm’s previous mobile chipset. Further, there are claims that the chipset will deliver up to 98 per cent faster Hexagon neural processing unit performance and 40 per cent better performance per Watt. The Sensing Hub, which uses OpenAI’s Whisper for speech recognition, gives the AI engine information about the user, like location, for personalised services.

Generative AI will also help in the chipset’s image processing capabilities. There will be support for generative fill so you can easily zoom out and re-crop photos. In the video department, there’s an object eraser and on-device night mode recording at up to 4K / 30p. Google has announced its Night Sight for video feature coming to the Pixel 8 Pro, but it will run in the Cloud.

There will also be something called Vlogger’s View that will layer video from the selfie and rear cameras together into one view. We will delve into the feature in the coming days.

Qualcomm is promising gaming upgrades with support for Unreal Engine 5.2 besides hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with global illumination. Qualcomm says it helps deliver “lifelike, multi-source lighting” in games.

Further, Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 will reportedly double frame rates without increasing power consumption. If a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered device is hooked to an external 240Hz display, you’ll be able to play games at up to 240 fps. Another point for gamers: Gameplay audio will be synced to the millisecond, according to Qualcomm. In other words, there shouldn’t be any lag while using earbuds.

iQOO 12 will be the first smartphone to come with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.