At the Snapdragon Summit today, Qualcomm is officially announcing the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its flagship SoC for smartphones. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a major upgrade from its predecessor, with improvements across the board. Qualcomm is also changing its naming scheme for its flagship SoCs from Snapdragon 8 Gen X to Snapdragon X Elite.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite will be built using TSMC"s 3nm process node for significant performance and efficiency gains. For the first time, Qualcomm is bringing its in-house developed Oryon custom ARM CPUs to smartphones. The new Prime and Performance cores architecture comes with a 24MB cache and can hit 4.32GHz frequency, delivering the following performance improvements:
- 45% single core improvement
- 45% multi-core improvement
- 63% web browsing performance improvement
The GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers a 40% performance improvement and a 35% ray tracing improvement. When it comes to AI performance using the NPU, the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be a huge leap forward. With the fastest Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (6-core vector accelerator and 8-core scalar accelerator), you can get 45% better performance compared to the NPU in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
In addition to performance improvements, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is also much better at power savings. Qualcomm claims the following power savings improvements:
- 44% CPU
- 40% GPU
- 45% AI perf/watt
- 27% overall SoC
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a powerhouse when it comes to camera capabilities, with 4.3 Gigapixels/sec support and a 33% throughput improvement. It features Limitless Segmentation, AI Relighting, an AI Pet Suite, a Video Magic Eraser, and more. In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite comes with the Snapdragon X80 modem, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, and support for Wi-Fi 7.
Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, said:
"With leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency 3. In addition, it revolutionizes mobile experiences by offering personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritizing user privacy."
Qualcomm will reveal more details about the Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC later today. With its impressive specs and features, this new SoC is poised to power the next generation of premium smartphone experiences.
Update:
Qualcomm revealed that several Android OEMs including ASUS, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more are expected to launch smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Source: Qualcomm