Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Elite chip with Oryon CPU, 40% faster GPU

Following a lengthy leak campaign, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is official as the latest flagship chipset poised to power the next generation of Android flagships. As you might have guessed, Qualcomm is going for a unified naming scheme with its ARM-based X Elite laptop chips.

Like the Snapdragon laptop chips, 8 Elite brings an Oryon CPU with a custom eight-core structure consisting of 2x prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and 6x performance units working at up to 3.53 GHz. That’s paired with an industry-leading 24MB L2 cache and support for 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM.

The new chip is fabbed on TSMC’s 3nm process and promises a 45% boost in CPU performance and 44% improved power efficiency over its predecessor.

On the graphics side, Qualcomm is debuting its revamped Adreno GPU which brings a 40% uplift in performance and power savings alongside improved 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 the AI side, the new Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) ensures AI tasks run 45% faster with improved performance per watt. Qualcomm is bringing its AI Engine with multimodal Gen AI support. Large and small multimodal models with the ability to run up to 70 tokens on SLMs.

Snapdragon 8 Elite also features an enhanced image signal processing (ISP) which is more deeply integrated with the new Hexagon NPU. You get improved HDR, more natural-looking skin tone, sky colors, and improved autofocus performance. Qualcomm also added chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation and video object eraser functionality.

On the connectivity side, 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 peak downloads rated at 10 Gbps and a theoretical max 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.

Snapdragon 8 Elite is set to power the upcoming crop of Android flagships smartphones from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi, and others.