Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

Qualcomm’s peak disclosure: an explicit parameter ceiling and token rate against a named model. Neither successor repeated it.

This generation carried the most concrete on-device generative claim Qualcomm has ever made for: up to 10 billion parameters, up to 20 tokens per second, footnoted against Llama 2 7B. Both following generations dropped the parameter ceiling entirely, which makes 2023 the high-water mark for checkable Qualcomm AI figures.

Silicon from Qualcomm

9 chips on record, newest first.

  1. 2026

    Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6

    2nm Reengineered Hexagon NPU

    35% improved NPU performance

    Relative only
  2. 2026

    Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6

    2nm Hexagon NPU

    14% improved NPU performance

    Relative only
  3. 2025

    Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme

    Not stated by Qualcomm Hexagon NPU

    The Qualcomm Hexagon NPU features 80 TOPS of AI processing

    Absolute
  4. 2025

    Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

    3nm Hexagon NPU with Fused AI Accelerator

    37% faster Hexagon NPU, 16% better performance per watt

    Relative only
  5. 2024

    Snapdragon 8 Elite

    3nm Hexagon NPU

    45% faster Hexagon NPU, 45% better performance per watt

    Relative only
  6. 2023

    Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra

    Not stated by Qualcomm PCIe card, 64 AI cores, 576 MB SRAM, 150 W

    ML capacity (INT8): 870 TOPs

    Absolute
  7. 2023

    Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

    4nm Hexagon NPU

    Up to 98% faster Hexagon NPU; on-device models up to 10B parameters at up to 20 tokens/sec (Llama 2 7B)

    Relative only
  8. 2022

    Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

    4nm Hexagon NPU

    Up to 4.35x faster AI performance than its predecessor

    Relative only
  9. 2021

    Snapdragon 8 Gen 1

    4nm 7th Gen AI Engine with Hexagon processor

    AI Engine up to 4x faster than predecessor

    Relative only

Compare against every other vendor in the silicon tracker

Qualcomm in the news