A new year, a new Snapdragon chip – actually, Qualcomm makes a good amount of different chipsets for different applications and devices throughout the entire year, although there’s a different level of excitement and anticipation when it comes to its flagship-grade SoCs. As such, the company finally unveiled its latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip during the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, promising a lot of new enhancements for upcoming Android devices.
You’ve probably noticed that it’s not referred to as the “8 Gen 4” as a lot of early reports did. With the Snapdragon 8 Elite Qualcomm is also revamping its naming scheme, most probably to establish a more uniform approach with the rest of its products (such as the Snapdragon X Elite chips). With all that said, let’s take a look at what it packs inside.
Main Highlights
Let’s take a look at what Qualcomm is promising with the new chip – the Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first mobile chip from the company that comes with Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU (moving away from its old Kryo hardware), and it’s designed with on-device genAI software in mind, as the industry moves even faster towards an AI-based approach to mobile computing.
Speaking of the Oryon CPU in particular, Qualcomm has designed its with prime cores running at 4.32Ghz, which work alongside a number of performance cores which are clocked at 3.53Ghz. Qualcomm’s boasting a pretty significant performance leap with the 8 Elite, with as much as 45% improvement for single-core performance, at least when compared to the 8 Gen 3 from last year. Another improvement is with regards to power management, with up to 45% better efficiency this time around.
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Gaming and Performance
Of course at this point in time we’re still waiting to see how phones running on the Snapdragon 8 Elite will perform in real-world usage, but Qualcomm’s early benchmarks at least give us an idea of what to expect with the new SoC. The company says that (based on Geekbench testing), the Snapdragon 8 Elite managed a score of 3,221 for single-core performance and 10,426 for multi-core testing, both of which out-perform the 8 Gen 3’s 2,193 and 7,304 scores respectively.
There’s little doubt that the 8 Elite’s performance upgrades will also appeal to users looking for a capable chip for their gaming needs. Overall performance upgrades amount to a 40% increase this time around, and the chip does come with Qualcomm’s usual array of gaming features such as ray tracing capabilities, and supports game engines such as Unreal Engine Nanite, and the Unreal Engine Chaos Physics Engine.
AI Smarts and Photography
The Snapdragon 8 Elite likewise comes with Qualcomm’s AI Engine which features multimodal Gen AI which works by understanding voice, text, images, and even visual input from a user’s device components such as the camera. Qualcomm’s new Hexagon NPU also packs up to 45% faster performance for AI tasks, and the chip’s AI capabilities let it work with Qualcomm’s Sensing Hub – this is a means for the hardware to understand personal context, allowing the multimodal generative AI assistant within to offer tailored suggestions and decisions, for example.
The chip’s AI capabilities extends to camera performance. In addition to existing optimizations for camera hardware, the 8 Elite’s NPU will be able to work with raw sensor data in photos, in addition to other AI-based video and photo features such as video relighting, an object eraser tool for videos, all without needing to save files to the cloud.
We can expect to see the Snapdragon 8 Elite arrive in phones from several manufacturers including ASUS, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more within the coming weeks and months.
