Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite with 45% CPU Boost and Advanced AI Capabilities

As anticipated, Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform at this year’s Snapdragon Tech Summit, its newest flagship. This new chip is the first to feature Qualcomm’s 2nd-gen Oryx CPU, capable of hitting a top clock speed up to 4.32 GHz for a claimed performance increase between single and multi-threaded workloads by as much as 45%, all while improving power efficiency (upwards of ~44%) over its predecessor.

The All New Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite

The chipset combines 2 Prime cores that go up to a frequency of 4.32GHz, six Performance stacks at the maximum speed of about 3.53 GHz, and utilizes LPDDR5X memory clocked at up to 5300 MHz. Qualcomm highlights the mobile industry’s largest shared cache, which significantly accelerates data retrieval and extends battery life. The company says the result is a 27% total Power reduction and up to 2.5 hours of additional game time.

Compared to the 1st-gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU, the 2nd-gen model delivers 30% faster performance while consuming 57% less power. In benchmarks, it outpaces Apple’s A18 Pro and boasts up to 162% faster performance than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 Series at comparable power levels, with Intel’s chip requiring 190% more power to match its peak performance. The Snapdragon 8 Elite also debuts the first Adreno GPU with sliced architecture, and each slice has its own memory instead of sharing it.

The GPU offers 40% faster performance, 40% improved power efficiency, and a 35% boost in ray-tracing compared to its predecessor. It’s the first mobile GPU to fully support Unreal Engine 5.3 Nanite, enabling film-quality 3D environments.

AI performance enhances with its advanced Hexagon NPU, claims Qualcomm AI Engine and also this AI engine improves efficiency by 45% per watt. Supporting intelligent interaction across voice, text and images with Multimodal Gen AI along-with real-time recognition of over 250 layers in an image using Limitless Segmentation technology by the ISP powered through AI.

The other improvements are limited to the radio but interesting in their own right, with Qualcomm using a Snapdragon X80 5G Modem for improved coverage on sub-6 and millimeter wave bands, while Wi-Fi 7 is also finding its way into Elite devices which will offer faster speeds. FastConnect 7800 adds support for dual Bluetooth connectivity and offers even more power-saving.

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