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.
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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