The Snapdragon 8 Elite — Qualcomm’s latest high-end mobile processor — was unveiled at the company’s annual Snapdragon Summit on Monday. Upcoming flagship Android smartphones from several manufacturers are expected to launch with the new processor in the coming months, and the chip maker has touted the new performance and efficiency improvements that the Snapdragon 8 Elite brings. The new naming scheme aligns the flagship smartphone chip brand with the company’s Snapdragon X Elite, which was launched earlier this year for laptops that offer support for AI features.
Qualcomm has made some significant updates to its flagship chipset this year, such as ditching the efficient cores on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The new chip is also built on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, which allows chipmakers to deliver better performance along with improved efficiency. According to Qualcomm, smartphone makers will also be able to offer longer software support for phones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.
Snapdragon 8 Elite: 10 things to know about the new chipset
- Revised naming scheme: In 2021, Qualcomm dropped the three-digit naming convention for its chips, which meant that the successor to the Snapdragon 888 arrived as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Three years later, the company’s flagship chip is now called the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is similar to the company’s laptop chip — the Snapdragon X Elite.
- Architectural changes: The Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm’s first chipset built on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, which is also used to make Apple’s A18 Pro chip. This year, Qualcomm used special Oryon cores instead of Kryo cores. There are two main cores clocked at 4.32 GHz, as well as six cores with a maximum clock speed of 3.53 GHz. Unlike its predecessor, this chipset does not contain efficient cores.
- Productivity and efficiency: Compared to Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the new chipset is said to offer 40 percent improved performance and 44 percent improved power efficiency. Qualcomm also says the updated Adreno GPU offers a 40 percent jump in both power and efficiency, while delivering a 35 percent improvement in ray tracing.
- Artificial intelligence: Qualcomm says its latest Hexagon NPU on the Snapdragon 8 Elite can deliver a 45 percent increase in AI performance compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor that was introduced a year ago. The new chip is also designed to provide higher performance when running multimodal large language models (LLM) on the device.
- Cameras: Smartphones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor will be able to use the Hexagon NPU to offer features such as erasing photo and video objects on the device. These phones will also be able to offer “real-time skin and sky adjustments,” allowing users to optimize lighting and color while capturing images.
- Displays: According to the chipmaker, smartphones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip can have displays with up to Quad-HD+ resolution, 10-bit color depth and up to 240Hz refresh rate. These phones can also be connected to external displays with up to 8K resolution and 30Hz refresh rate.
- Connectivity options: Customers will get support for Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity as well as Wi-Fi 7 via the Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 mobile communications system. The chip maker says the Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF Tensor AI Accelerator and 4×6 MIMO solution will deliver multi-gigabit connectivity 5G. The chipset is also claimed to offer a 30 percent increase in GPS accuracy compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor.
- Game improvements: the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip can use Nanite, a virtualized geometry system on Unreal Engine 5.3, to enhance 3D environments while providing realistic interactions using the Unreal Chaos Physics engine. Meanwhile, the Adreno Frame Motion Engine 2.0 will “double the frame rate of games,” according to Qualcomm.
- Advanced software support: At the current Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm senior vice president Christopher Patrick said the chipmaker will support the new processor for eight years with eight generations of Android. If a phone equipped with this processor comes with Android 15 out of the box, it can theoretically be upgraded to Android 23 if the OEM provides the necessary software support. It’s worth noting that Samsung and Google currently offer seven years of support for their latest flagship models.
- Expected devices: Smartphone manufacturers have already confirmed that they will launch new smartphones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. Customers can expect to see new phones from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi in the coming weeks or months. Some of these smartphones are expected to be launched in China before they are launched in global markets.
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