On the first day of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company announced its latest flagship SoC called the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This marks a pivotal move to leverage the technical capabilities of the acquired Nuvia team.
The new chip is powered by Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon core, moving away from reliance on Arm’s off-the-shelf Cortex cores to power its flagship mobile SoCs. However, the Oryon core is still based on Arm’s v8.7-A ISA, so while the chipmaker hasn’t strayed too far from the previous generation, as Qualcomm aims to do things its own way. It’s definitely one step away.
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The new Oryon core found in the Snapdragon 8 Elite replaces the Kryo core that Qualcomm has relied on for years. The group claims this new Elite SoC is 44% more power efficient than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but as always with these numbers, before you take this as gospel, be careful. It’s worth waiting until real world benchmarks are published.
For manufacturing, Qualcomm is using TSMC’s 3nm N3E node, which is actually the same process used by rivals like Apple’s A18 chip and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400.
The Snapdragon manufacturer also took a different path in design, opting to do away with the familiar combination of prime, performance, and efficiency cores, and eliminate smaller cores altogether. Snapdragon 8 Elite comes with two prime cores running at 4.32 GHz and six performance cores at 3.53 GHz.
It wouldn’t be a new chip if it wasn’t packed with AI, and Qualcomm has actually included the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Hexagon NPU. The chipmaker claims a 60 percent improvement in “AI performance” over the previous generation, but it’s still a long way from seeing that in real-world applications.
Graphics are also improved over the previous generation with the latest Adreno 750 GPU. Qualcomm throws in hardware-accelerated ray tracing and support for 144Hz at 4K, claiming a notable 25% improvement over Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but as always, benchmarks Until proven otherwise, these numbers are just marketing.
MediaTek Dimensity 9400 offers 8K 60fps, so it’s a bit tricky to limit recording to 4K 60fps. When it comes to image quality, the chip giant’s Spectra ISP has been rebranded as AI ISP for the Snapdragon 8 Elite, increasing throughput from 3.2 gigapixels per second to 4.3 gigapixels per second. It also supports configurations such as 48MP + 48MP + 48MP multi-sensor and 108MP single camera at 30FPS. Qualcomm has increased still image support to 320MP compared to 200MP on the previous Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Other features of the Snapdragon 8 Elite include Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless technology, which is said to deliver up to 24-bit 48kHz Bluetooth audio streaming and 96kHz over Wi-Fi. It also features the famous XPAN technology for wide range audio coverage over low-power Wi-Fi 7. On the connectivity side, the Snapdragon X80 5G modem supports multi-gigabit speeds with 4×6 MIMO, and the FastConnect 7900 system integrates Wi-Fi. Bluetooth and UWB proximity capabilities that enable features such as object tracking and building access control.
Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Insight, said the Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm’s strongest chipset launch to date, pushing AI to the forefront of the platform. “Snapdragon 8 Elite provides the foundation to accelerate the introduction of AI capabilities into third-party apps and integrated multimodal assistants,” he said.
Gebbie also highlighted support from major device manufacturers such as Honor, Samsung, and Xiaomi, meaning Qualcomm will maintain its presence in the premium Android segment. “Early support from device manufacturers such as Honor, Samsung, and Xiaomi is a strong start for Qualcomm as we aim to maintain our dominance at the premium end of the Android smartphone market.”
Several devices have already been announced that will put the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the hands of consumers, including the Xiaomi 15 series, OnePlus 13, iQOO 13, and Honor Magic 7. These are expected to start appearing in stores by the end of the year. October. Brands like Vivo and Oppo may end up with more Snapdragon 8 Elite devices, but all evidence remains on actual performance and how it stacks up against Apple and MediaTek’s product sets. It is compared to ®
