Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite with Oryon CPU and 40% faster GPU is here
After various leaks, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is finally official. The Americans’ latest flagship chipset is set to power the next generation of Android flagships. Like the Snapdragon X Elite notebook chips, the 8 Elite also features an Oryon CPU with a custom eight-core structure. This consists of two prime cores with a clock speed of 4.32 GHz and six performance cores with up to 3.53 GHz. There is also an enormous 24 MB L2 cache and support for 5,300 MHz LPDDR5X RAM.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is manufactured in a 3 Nm process by TSMC and promises a 45% increase in CPU performance. At the same time, Qualcomm has improved energy efficiency by 44% compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The redesigned Adreno GPU brings 35% more ray tracing power and increases both performance and power efficiency by 40%.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is also the first mobile chipset to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system. On the AI side, Hexagon’s new neural processing unit (NPU) makes AI tasks run 45% faster while delivering higher performance per watt. It also supports multimodal Gen AI models with the ability to run up to 70 tokens on SLMs.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite also features improved image signal processing (ISP) that’s more deeply integrated into the new Hexagon NPU. You get improved HDR, more natural-looking skin tones, sky colors, and improved autofocus performance. Qualcomm has also added chip-level semantic segmentation of photos and videos and a video object deletion feature.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite with 10 Gbps fast downloads
On the connectivity side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features the new Snapdragon X80 5G modem – the first 5G modem with 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension. Qualcomm claims peak downloads of 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 in a single 6 Nm chip. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is expected to power the next generation of Android flagship smartphones. The first buyers will include Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, vivo and Xiaomi.
