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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series of chipsets have been used in some of the best, and most powerful Android smartphones over the years. During the 2024 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm is shaking things up with the announcement of its latest flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Instead of continuing the Snapdragon 8 Gen X series of naming, the company has opted to rename their chipsets with the Elite branding. It might seem confusing, but it’s rightfully deserved. Especially when you consider the fact that the new Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first Snapdragon mobile chipset to feature the use of Qualcomm’s latest custom Oryon CPU cores.
Why does this matter?
Prior to this, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipsets were using Kryo cores that are custom cores licensed from Arm. With the Oryon, these are custom cores designed by Qualcomm. Qualcomm will continue to license from Arm, but only the instruction set. This opens the door to more possibilities and customization and the potential to create something even better and more powerful.
According to Qualcomm, the new Oryon cores feature Prime cores that are clocked at 4.32GHz. Then there are also a bunch of Performance cores that are clocked at 3.53GHz. The use of these new cores will result in 45% improvement in single-core performance, and 45% increase in multi-core performance. Qualcomm is also boasting 62% improvements in web browsing, along with a 24MP total cache.
Power saving capabilities
With the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, it seems that future devices that take advantage of the chipset can expect power-saving capabilities. This means that in theory, handset makers can maintain the same battery size, but squeeze out more life. This is because with the new Oryon cores, Qualcomm says that we can expect up to 45% in power savings from the CPU.
It also features the use of Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, which will also have power savings of up to 40%. Seeing as how AI is all the rage these days, especially for on-device processing, the new chipset will also provide power savings of up to 45% in AI performance per watt.
Great for gaming
Obviously with this much power, the new Snapdragon 8 Elite will be a gamer’s dream come true. Gamers can look forward to massive improvements when it comes to performance, up to 40%. There will also be improvements made to ray tracing, up to 35%, along with the use of Unreal Engine Nanite, as well as support for Unreal Engine Chaos Physics Engine.
How this will actually affect gameplay in real-life remains to be seen, but with these improvements we can expect much smoother gameplay as well as support for higher-res graphics and textures.
Improved camera capabilities
Photo taken in Bangkok, Thailand
There’s a lot more to cameras on our smartphones other than the sensor and lens choice. There is the underlying hardware that is used to help process the images, which is where the Snapdragon 8 Elite comes in. The new chipset from Qualcomm will boast new features where the NPU of the chipset can directly access raw sensor data. This is a first for Qualcomm and will help with features like real-time AI enhancements.
Speaking of AI, the chipset will offer features like AI relighting for video. This helps create a virtual movable light source that can match the contours of a face. There is also an AI Pet Suite, and a Video Magic Eraser feature that can remove objects from videos. The best part is that this can be done without having to upload to the cloud, thus reducing latency and also ensuring a greater degree of privacy.
Availability
So, which handset makers will be using the new chipset from Qualcomm? According to the company, brands such as ASUS, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, and Xiaomi are just some of the many who are expected to launch devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
In fact, OnePlus is poised to launch the OnePlus 13 soon which will use the chipset. We also expect that devices like the Samsung Galaxy S25 series coming in 2025 will take advantage of Qualcomm’s latest technology.
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