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

After a long campaign of leaks, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is official as the latest chipset set to power the next generation of Android flagships. As you might have guessed, Qualcomm is opting for a unified naming scheme with its ARM-based X Elite laptop chips.

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

The new chip is manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm process and promises a 45% increase in CPU performance and a 44% improvement in energy efficiency over its predecessor.

On the graphics side, Qualcomm is launching its revamped Adreno GPU, which brings a 40% increase in performance and power savings, as well as better ray tracing performance.

Qualcomm’s new chip is also the first mobile SoC to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system.

Moving to the AI ​​side, the new Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) ensures AI tasks run 45% faster with better performance per watt. Qualcomm is bringing its AI Engine with Gen AI multimodal support. Large and small multimodal models capable of running up to 70 tokens in SLMs.

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

On the connectivity side, the 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 are 10 Gbps and a theoretical maximum 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 on a single 6nm chip.

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