Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC Announced: Flagship Phone Gaming, AI

Qualcomm has taken the wraps off its new Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC for the next generation of performance flagship Android smartphones. This is the first smartphone platform to feature Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon CPU cores, which have previously been building blocks for the company’s Snapdragon X series of laptop CPUs. The Oryon core was developed following Qualcomm’s acquisition of CPU design startup Nuvia, and represents a return to custom core design for Qualcomm, which previously dropped its own Kryo cores in favour of Arm’s stock Cortex offerings.

The new Snapdragon 8 Elite was announced at Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii. The company calls it “the most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever”. The platform promises to enable on-device multi-modal generative AI applications, new camera features, and up to a 40 percent performance improvement in gaming. Overall SoC-level power consumption is also said to be down by 27 percent, potentially delivering better battery life and generating less heat.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite has a peak clock speed of 4.32GHz on two prime cores or up to 3.53GHz on its other six performance cores. These are all based on Qualcomm’s second-gen Oryon architecture. There’s 24MB of shared cache, which the company also says is the highest ever for a smartphone SoC. Devices can have up to 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM. 

A new integrated Adreno GPU uses a “sliced” architecture with a dedicated memory block for each slice, which Qualcomm says boosts performance and battery life. The company also touts “film-quality” 3D environments thanks to support for Unreal Engine 5.3 Nanite and advanced physics simulations as well as improved ray tracing performance. 

The Snapdragon 8 Elite’s overhauled image signal processor now leverages AI to enhance skin tones, faces, hair, backgrounds and various textures by segmenting shots into as many as 250 layers for independent processing. Pet capture is improved, with the company saying AI can help even with animals that are running around. AI-powered object removal now works in videos, fully on-device. Face recognition also helps with automatic focus, exposure and white balance settings. Video quality is also said to be improved, even in “near darkness” at 4K 60fps.

AI will of course be a big selling point for devices based on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, with Qualcomm promising 45 percent faster processing and 45 percent better performance per Watt. Input support is now improved enough to allow entire book chapters to be processed as a single contextual token, and live camera visuals can be used to prompt queries, generate summaries or create content.  

Interestingly, devices will be able to generate “cryptographic seals” to verify that an image, video or audio recording is genuine and has not been altered after being captured. 

Other platform features and improvements include support for Qualcomm aptX lossless audio and XPAN for greater range when using audio over Bluetooth 6.0. AI is used to optimise 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connectivity. Device tracking supported with more accurate proximity detection by combining multiple wireless protocols, and location positioning accuracy in covered areas is also said to be improved. 

Multiple global smartphone manufacturers have announced that they will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite for their next-gen flagships. Realme is likely to be the first in India with its GT 7 Pro in November, while Asus has confirmed its ROG Phone 9 will launch on November 19. The OnePlus 13 is launching this month in China, while the Xiaomi 15 series is also expected to be unveiled there this month. iQoo 13 and Honor Magic7 series will soon be announced with this SoC. Vivo is likely to expand its X200 series with an X200 Ultra model.