Technology
Danish Kapoor
Danish Kapoor

Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon 8 Elite: It comes with Oryon CPU and 40 percent faster GPU

Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which has been on the agenda with leaks for a long time. This chip, which will power Android’s new generation flagship phones, offers important innovations in terms of performance and efficiency. The company is going for a unifying approach in the naming structure with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, as it does with its ARM-based X Elite laptop chips.

Snapdragon 8 Elite has the Oryon CPU used in laptop chips. This specially designed eight-core processor consists of 2 main cores running at 4.32 GHz and 6 performance cores running at 3.53 GHz. It also offers an industry-leading structure with 24MB L2 cache and 5,300 MHz LPDDR5X RAM support.

The new chip was developed on TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing process and promises 45 percent higher processor performance and 44 percent more energy efficiency compared to its previous generation.

On the graphics side, Qualcomm introduces its completely renewed Adreno GPU. While this GPU provides a 40 percent increase in performance, it also offers a similar amount of savings in energy consumption. Additionally, ray tracing performance has also been improved.

Qualcomm’s new chip is also the first mobile SoC to offer Unreal Engine 5.3 and Nanite virtualized geometric system support. This provides significant improvements in gaming experience and graphics quality.

Snapdragon 8 Elite is equipped with the new Hexagon AI processing unit (NPU) that performs AI tasks 45% faster. This unit, whose watt efficiency per performance has also been increased, works with Qualcomm’s multi-mode Gen AI engine. This engine is compatible with SLMs (Large Language Models) that can run on up to 70 tokens, supporting both large and small scale models.

Additionally, an advanced signal processing unit (ISP) is offered on the image processing side. More deeply integrated with the new Hexagon NPU, this ISP delivers HDR improvements, more natural skin tones, sky colors and improved autofocus performance. The chip also supports semantic segmentation and video object deletion in photos and videos.

On the connectivity side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is equipped with the Snapdragon X80 5G modem, which is the first 5G modem to offer 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-powered mmWave coverage expansion. Qualcomm states that a download speed of 10 Gbps and a theoretical upload speed of 3.5 Gbps can be achieved with this modem.

The new modem is also paired with FastConnect 7900, the first mobile connection system that combines Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) connection technologies in a 6nm structure.

Which manufacturers will use Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite?

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite will power new flagship Android phones from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi and other leading brands.

Danish Kapoor