Here Qualcomm unveils its flagship System on Chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii. The new chip marks a significant break for the company as it is shifting away from Arm’s standard Cortex cores and launching its in-house custom cores titled Oryon. Although the Oryon cores run on Arm’s v8.7-A architecture, they highlight the ambition Qualcomm has to finally have complete control over its hardware development process.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite shows a notable 44% increase in power efficiency over its direct predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Of course, word of caution from industry experts: wait until it’s put to the real-world benchmark tests. The chip is fabricated on TSMC’s advanced 3nm N3E node, the same process used by competitors like Apple’s A18 and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400.
Unlike the previous generation, Qualcomm has done away with smaller cores and instead allowed for the integration of two prime cores at 4.32 GHz as well as six performance cores at 3.53 GHz. Its latest chip also boasts the Hexagon NPU to enhance AI ability and promises a 60% improvement in AI performance over previous variants.
Graphics performance has been improved in the Adreno 750, which supports graphics, and GPU housing up to hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The Snapdragon 8 Elite also carries support for 144Hz at 4K resolution. Said smartphone can only do 4K 60fps video recording; image processing features have also been upgraded, supporting up to 320MP still images and multi-sensor configurations for cameras.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Adoption Qualcomm would expect prominent Android manufacturers, such as Samsung, Xiaomi, and Honor, to adopt this chip. Some of the smartphones that are expected shortly include the Xiaomi 15 series and the OnePlus 13. With AI at the core, this newest Qualcomm release seems geared to fulfill the growing demand for a premium Android market, and it will improve performance.
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