Qualcomm debuts flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite processor
Thursday, October 24, 2024 at 5:59AM 
Image: Qualcomm
You can expect the upcoming generation of Android flagships to feature Qualcomm's newest chipset. The company announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, unifying its naming scheme with the ARM-based X Elite laptop chips. Like those processors, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has an Oryon CPU with a custom eight-core structure consisting of 2x prime cores clocked at 4.32GHz and 6x performance units running up to 3.53GHz. This CPU is paired with a 24MLB cache and supports 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is fabricated on TSMC's 3nm process, promising a 45% improvement in CPU performance and a 44% power efficiency boost over its predecessor. Meanwhile, on the graphics side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite gets a redesigned Adreno GPU that boosts performance by 40% and improves its power savings as well as its ray-tracing capabilities. This system-on-chip will be the first mobile SoC to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system.
Aside from boosting gaming capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features a new Hexagon neural processing unit that ensures artificial intelligence tasks run 45% faster with improved performance per watt. It also gets Qualcomm's AI Engine with multimodal generative AI support.
On the photo and video side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has enhanced image signal processing that's deeply integrated with the new Hexagon NPU, improved HDR, more natural-looking skin tone, sky colours, and better autofocus performance. Qualcomm also adds chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation and video object eraser functionality.
As for connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has the Snapdragon X80 5G modem, its first 5G modem with 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension. Qualcomm claims peak downloads rated at 10 Gbps and max upload of 3.5 Gbps.
The new modem is paired with the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, the first system to combine Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra Wideband connectivity in a single 6nm processor.
Qualcomm said we could expect the Snapdragon 8 Elite on Android smartphones from brands like ASUS, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, realme, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi, and more.
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