Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite announced with massive performance boost and more

Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit event is responsible for announcing some of the best smartphone chipsets every year, and this year is no different. Qualcomm has announced the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset with better general performance, better thermal efficiency claims and more. The brand has also sent its naming scheme for a toss. Again.

Here’s everything you need to know about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, and its new upgrades, along with a list of expected brands that will adopt the chip later this year.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite: What’s new?

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite is built on a 3nm architecture and manufactured by Taiwan-based TSMC. The processor comes with new cores as always, but the highlight is the boost in performance over any chipset the Snapdragon 8 series has seen in recent years.

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That’s because the Snapdragon 8 Elite offers 45 per cent better performance, 40 per cent better graphical performance and 44 per cent better power efficiency, compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which was already a pretty powerful flagship chipset.

That’s not all. The new processor’s Hexagon NPU also supports Unreal Engine 5.3 – the same engine that powers many AAA games like Black Myth: Wukong and Ghost of Tsushima.

Other improvements include an improved ISP (Image Signal Processor) that should offer a better HDR performance and a new Snapdragon X80 5G modem, which claims peak download speeds of 10Gbps. This is joined by support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Ultrawideband connectivity.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite: What’s at the core of it all?

The Snapdragon 8 Elite comes with a custom eight-core design, that includes two primary Oryon cores that can clock up to 4.32GHz and six performance cores that can clock up to 3.53GHz.

As is the growing trend with several MediaTek chipsets like the MediaTek Dimensity 9400, the Snapdragon 8 Elite also has no efficiency cores. That’s probably because the performance cores in today’s mobile chipsets have become so power efficient that dedicated efficiency cores have become redundant.

Lastly, an improved NPU is also expected to make generative AI perform better on smartphones powered by the chipset, although completely local Gen-AI processing is still a mystery. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is expected to be adopted by several brands over the next few months for their flagship Android phones. These include names like OnePlus, Xiaomi, Samsung, and Realme, among others.