The new chip is designed to sit just below the current flagship in terms of capabilities and price. Most of the 8 Gen 3's features are intended to be available to more affordable phones. It is a new tier for the top-of-the-line 8-series chips. The 8S Gen 3 does not have a performance core like the standard 8 Gen 3, but it does have the same graphics card, and it runs at a lower Frequency. The X70 5G modem is used in the new 8S Gen 3. It seems like a benchmark of phone flagship-iness to support hardware-accelerated ray tracing so games run more smoothly. The 8S Gen 3 can run large language models of up to 10 billion parameters and supports multimodal generative artificial intelligence on-device. It doesn't offer all of the capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but it does support some of them. Deepu John, senior director of product management, explains that each tier can be broken down into three subcategories. The S series chip sits just below the standard 8 Gen 3, and if there ever is an 8 Plus Gen 3, it would sit on top.
It gets more confusing when you know that phone manufacturers are still using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in not-quite flagship phones like the OnePlus 12R. The 8S Gen 3 is just below the 7 Gen 3, though it has only appeared in a few phones. The high-end phone market appears to be being slashed by Qualcomm in an attempt to keep the OEMs from using MediaTek for their less-flagship devices.