After a long leak campaign, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is official as the latest flagship chipset that is set to power the next generation of Android flagships. As you might have guessed, Qualcomm is going to introduce a unified naming scheme with its ARM-based X Elite laptop chips.
Like Snapdragon laptop chips, the 8 Elite brings Orion CPUs with a custom eight-core architecture that includes 2x prime cores running at 4.32 GHz and 6x performance units operating at up to 3.53 GHz. This is paired with support for an industry-leading 24MB L2 cache and 5,300 MHz LPDDR5X RAM.
The new chip is based on TSMC’s 3nm process and promises a 45% increase in CPU performance and 44% better power efficiency compared to its predecessor.
On the graphics front, Qualcomm is introducing its new Adreno GPU that brings a 40% boost in performance and power savings along with better ray-tracing performance.
Qualcomm’s new chip is also the first mobile SoC to bring support for Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system.
Moving on to AI, the new Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) ensures AI tasks run up to 45% faster with better performance per watt. Qualcomm is bringing its AI engine with multimodal Zen AI support. Large and small multicurrency models with the ability to run up to 70 tokens on SLM.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite also has an advanced image signal processing (ISP) that is more deeply integrated with the new Hexagon NPU. You get better HDR, more natural-looking skin tones, bluer colors, and better autofocus performance. Qualcomm has also added chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation and video object erasure functionality.
On the connectivity side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features the Snapdragon X80 5G modem – the first 5G modem with 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension. Qualcomm claims a maximum download of 10 Gbps and a theoretical maximum upload of 3.5 Gbps.
The new modem is paired with the FastConnect 7900 mobile connectivity system which is the first to combine Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Ultra Wideband connectivity in a single 6nm chip.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is set to power the upcoming crop of Android flagship smartphones from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi and others.
