Qualcomm has officially unveiled its latest flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, following an extended period of leaks. This new processor is set to drive the upcoming wave of premium Android smartphones.
In a move towards consistency, Qualcomm has adopted a unified naming convention, aligning with its ARM-based X Elite chips designed for laptops.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is based on TSMC’s cutting-edge 3nm process and boasts a 44% improvement in efficiency and a 45% boost in CPU processing speeds.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite shares similarities with its laptop counterparts, featuring an Oryon CPU. This custom-designed processor boasts an eight-core architecture, comprising two high-performance cores running at 4.32 GHz and six efficiency cores operating at speeds up to 3.53 GHz.
Complementing this powerful setup is a substantial 24MB L2 cache, setting a new standard in the industry. Additionally, the chipset supports LPDDR5X RAM with speeds reaching 5,300 MHz.
The company has introduced a revamped Adreno GPU as part of its new chipset, promising a significant boost in performance and energy efficiency. Users can expect a notable 40% improvement in these areas, along with enhanced capabilities in ray-tracing technology for gaming.
The new mobile SoC is pioneering support for Unreal Engine 5.3, including its advanced Nanite virtualized geometry system, which is an industry first for a smartphone chip.
At the heart of this chipset is the new Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). This specialized hardware accelerates AI tasks by 45%, while simultaneously improving energy efficiency. Qualcomm has also integrated its AI Engine, which boasts multimodal Gen AI support.
This feature enables the chip to handle large and small multimodal models, with the ability to process up to 70 tokens on Small Language Models (SLMs), marking a significant step forward in on-device AI processing.
The chip features an advanced image signal processing (ISP) unit, now more tightly integrated with the new Hexagon NPU. This synergy promises to deliver significant improvements in image quality, including enhanced HDR, more lifelike skin tones, and more vibrant sky colors. Users can also expect superior autofocus performance.
Qualcomm has also introduced chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation, along with a video object eraser function.
On the connectivity front, the Snapdragon 8 Elite comes equipped with the Snapdragon X80 5G modem. This modem is the first of its kind to support 6x downlink carrier aggregation and employs AI to extend the mmWave range. Qualcomm boasts impressive theoretical speeds, with downloads peaking at 10 Gbps and uploads reaching up to 3.5 Gbps.
The X80 5G modem is paired with the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, which brings yet another industry first. This system can combine Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra Wideband connectivity in a single 6nm chip, which hasn’t been done before.
Most OEMs in the next wave of Android flagships are set to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip including Xiaomi, Samsung, Vivo, Oppo, Realme, Honor, Asus, and several others.
Many have announced their flagship smartphone release dates already including the Honor Magic 7 series, OnePlus 13, and Realme GT7 Pro. The Xiaomi 15 is also expected to be one of the first devices to feature this chipset.