After a series of leaks, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is finally official, set to power the next wave of Android flagships. Qualcomm is adopting a unified naming approach, aligning it with its ARM-based X Elite laptop chips.
Like the X Elite, the Snapdragon 8 Elite comes with an Oryon CPU, featuring a custom eight-core design. It includes 2x prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and 6x performance cores running up to 3.53 GHz, paired with a massive 24MB L2 cache and support for 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM, making it a powerhouse for mobile devices.
Built on TSMC’s 3nm process, the new chip delivers a big leap in performance—offering a 45% boost in CPU power and 44% better energy efficiency compared to its predecessor.
On the graphics side, Qualcomm has introduced a redesigned Adreno GPU, promising 40% more performance and power savings, along with enhanced ray-tracing capabilities for smoother, more immersive visuals.
First Snapdragon to Support Nanite Engine 5
Qualcomm’s new chip is the first mobile SoC to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and its Nanite virtualized geometry system, setting the stage for next-level mobile gaming.
On the AI front, the upgraded Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) boosts AI performance by 45%, making tasks faster and more efficient. Qualcomm’s AI Engine also supports multimodal Gen AI, allowing it to handle both large and small AI models, with the capability to run up to 70 tokens on SLMs for more advanced AI applications.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite also comes with an upgraded image signal processor (ISP), now more closely integrated with the new Hexagon NPU. This means better HDR, more lifelike skin tones and sky colors, and improved autofocus. Qualcomm has also added features like chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation, as well as a video object eraser.
For connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite includes the Snapdragon X80 5G modem, the first to offer 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-powered mmWave range extension. Qualcomm promises impressive speeds with peak download rates of 10 Gbps and theoretical max uploads of 3.5 Gbps.
The new modem is paired with the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, the first of its kind to combine Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra-Wideband connectivity all on a single 6nm chip.
Soon to Power the Next-Gen Smartphones
The Snapdragon 8 Elite will power the next generation of flagship Android smartphones from brands such as Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more.
