Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 to launch early

Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset in October of last year, so you'd normally assume its successor, tentatively called Elite 2, would arrive this coming October.

However, according to a rumor out of China, the next Elite will actually be announced in late September. Then, in October, we'll already see devices using it hitting the streets, at least in China.

Previously, the Elite 2's AnTuTu benchmark score got leaked, suggesting some pretty healthy upgrades in performance compared to its predecessor, and then we heard that its GPU performance would be up by 30%, while CPU performance will be up by 25% compared to the original 8 Elite.

So it's looking like a pretty important release, and one that will come sooner than usual in order to better allow Android device makers to compete head-on with Apple's new iPhone 17 family, which is expected to arrive in September. The earlier SoC launch could also help some Android OEMs move more units during the end-of-year holiday shopping season.

Source (in Chinese)