Qualcomm has officially unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its latest flagship mobile chipset designed to power the next generation of Android smartphones providing top level Performance and AI features.
The 8 Elite marks a fresh start for Qualcomm’s mobile SoCs, introducing the company’s own Oryon CPU cores and a new naming scheme to align with ARM-based X Elite chips used in high-end laptops.
The revamped Adreno GPU offers a 40% uplift in performance and power efficiency, along with 35% faster ray tracing. It also supports Unreal Engine 5.3 and its Nanite virtualized geometry system.
Built on TSMC’s 3nm process, it includes a 24MB L2 cache, 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM, and claims a 45% increase in CPU performance and 44% boost in power efficiency.
Oryon CPUs now power all eight cores in the processor, signifying Qualcomm's move away from off-the-shelf Arm CPU designs since 2016.
The 8 Elite is the first smartphone SoC to feature all-big cores, with an eight-core processor that includes 2x prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and 6x performance cores up to 3.53 GHz.
The new Hexagon NPU increases AI processing speed by 45%, while the AI ISP allows for real-time AI adjustments at 4K/60fps and advanced photo and video editing capabilities.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite features the Snapdragon X80 5G modem, supporting 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-powered mmWave range extension, alongside Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and UWB connectivity.