Today in Maui, Qualcomm took the wraps off of its newest silicon – Snapdragon 8 Elite. That’s right, a new name to go along with the world’s fastest chipset in a phone. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite can reach clock speeds of 4.32GHz, which is incredible. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was capped at 3.4GHz, and the newest competitor – MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 – only hits 3.63GHz. So this is a major advantage for Qualcomm.
But the real question is, what can you do with all that speed on a phone? Two letters, AI. That’s right, this faster speed is going to allow the Snapdragon 8 Elite to do more AI tasks and do them faster. Of course, having a 45% faster NPU helps in that regard.
Qualcomm calls the Snapdragon 8 Elite a “Generative AI Powerhouse.” It includes the fastest Hexagon NPU yet and an on-device multimodal-gen AI assistant.
Snapdragon 8 Elite could mean huge gains in battery life
Typically, year-over-year gains are pretty small on processors these days. But that’s not the case with Qualcomm and the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Of course, a big part of that is likely due to the entirely rebuilt second-generation Oryon cores being used here.
Qualcomm is touting a 45% improvement on the CPU, 40% on the GPU and 45% AI performance per watt, when compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. That brings the overall improvement to about 27% on the SoC.
When it comes to the Oryon CPU specifically, it has a 45% improvement on single-core and multi-core, 62% on web browsing and it also has a much larger cache this year, at 24MB. Technically, Qualcomm is doing two 12MB L2 caches here.
This all results in massive power savings on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, even though it is still using the N3E process from TSMC for this 3nm node. That’s going to result in additional battery life among all Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered devices.
Speaking of those devices, Qualcomm says that we should see devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in “the coming weeks” from a slew of manufacturers. These include ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more are on the way. Interestingly, Qualcomm actually mentioned Samsung, but they normally don’t, despite Samsung always using Snapdragon on its flagship phones.