Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Elite with Oryon CPU cores and confirms Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi release plans
Qualcomm has kicked off this year's Snapdragon Summit by unveiling the chipset that will underpin the next generation of high-end Android smartphones. As recent rumours suggested, Qualcomm has renamed its flagship mobile chipset once again, less than years after adopting its current 'Snapdragon 8 Gen' nomenclature.
This time around, Qualcomm has moved to 'Snapdragon 8 Elite', although it remains to be seen whether it will adopt generational or performance-based suffixes at a later date. The eagle-eyed will notice that the new chipset mirrors the name of Qualcomm's most powerful laptop SoC, which is more than a coincidence and marketing synergy.
According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first of its kind to feature Oryon CPU cores, which eschew the standard ARM cores upon which the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and its predecessors rely. As the graphic above shows, the Snapdragon 8 Elite contains two prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz, as well as six performance cores restricted to 3.53 GHz. In other words, the Snapdragon 8 Elite mirrors the CPU construction of MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 by omitting efficiency cores altogether.
Moreover, the Snapdragon 8 Elite adopts TSMC 3 nm nodes while providing 12 MB of L2 cache across its prime and performance cores. As a result, Qualcomm claims that its new chipset outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 by 45% in single and multi-threaded CPU tasks. On top of that, the Snapdragon 8 Elite boasts a 40% faster GPU and a 45% faster NPU.
Nonetheless, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is said to achieve power efficiency savings reaching 27% for the entire SoC, 40% for its GPU and 45% for its CPU. Meanwhile, the chipset's new 'sliced architecture' GPU supports Unreal Engine 5.3, Nanite and the Chaos physics system. Furthermore, Qualcomm has integrated a Snapdragon X80 5G modem that supports Wi-Fi 7 and a 4x6 MIMO antenna for 5.8 Gbit/s and 10 Gbit/s downlink speeds, respectively.
Incidentally, the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be compatible with up to 24 GB of RAM and should deliver up to 30% more location accuracy thanks to a triple-band GNSS module. So far, Qualcomm has confirmed that Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi will announce the first Snapdragon 8 Elite-based devices 'in the coming weeks'.
Source(s)
Qualcomm
