As has been rumored for some time, Qualcomm just announced the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3the anticipated and expected mid-generation refresh of the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 introduced last March. As we will see below, of course we cannot expect a big increase in performance, but they present some interesting innovations that make this silicon an excellent choice for the mid-range and even the mid-range.

As always, The launch was sent with a press release and nothing else, no presentation, as usually happens with the Snapdragon 8, which, as you know, is responsible for powering a large part of the high-end. And that, while partly understandable given the prestigious role of the top line, is no less true that in reality the middle class has far more commercial mileage.

And what does Qualcomm tell us about this mid-generation revival? The official note does not go into technical details as expected, but instead focuses on quantifying what this evolution means in terms of performance, which in the case of its CPU is estimated at almost 20% compared to its predecessor. A number that may seem high (and it is, of course), but it’s even short when compared to the increase they claim to have achieved with their Kyro GPU, which are at 40%.

However, as could also be expected, Qualcomm is focusing this Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 on its performance for performing artificial intelligence tasks locally.and at the moment it’s also talking about a 30% jump in performance compared to the previous generation, which is additionally combined with an estimated 12% improvement in its energy efficiency. And yes, that may not seem like a lot at first glance, but we have to realize how deeply demanding client-side AI is.

As an example of improvements in this regard, Qualcomm states that the Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 SoC is capable of proficiently implementing some of today’s most popular language modelsit is even possible to move versions with 7 billion parameters, such as the Baichuan-7B. And to mention more well-known ones, we are also on the list with Llama 2. So we can expect an enormous increase in mid-range AI-based features in the coming months.