Qualcomm has unveiled its latest and greatest mobile platform, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. The chipset will power the next generation of Android smartphones, likely to make an appearance in the Samsung Galaxy S25 series, among others.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite also represents yet another naming scheme shift for Qualcomm’s mobile line. Qualcomm turned the Snapdragon naming scheme on its head a few years ago with the “Snapdragon 8 Gen 1,” which was followed by the 8 Gen 2, and 8 Gen 3. Alas, it seems as though we won’t be getting a Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.
Regardless of naming, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm’s most powerful to date. Qualcomm flew me out to its annual Snapdragon Summit to check out what’s new in person.
Second-gen Oryon CPU
Qualcomm has engineered a second-gen iteration of the Oryon CPU for the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which Qualcomm says is the “fastest mobile CPU in the world.” According to the company, the Prime cores on the CPU on the Snapdragon 8 Elite offer 4.32GHz peak clock speeds, which will equate to a speed boost of an impressive 45%. That’s coupled with 27% overall power savings.
The two Prime cores on the Snapdragon 8 Elite are coupled with six performance cores, capable of clock speeds of 3.53GHz.
Over the past decade or so, Apple’s A-series chips have been ahead in terms of basic CPU performance, but it seems as though that race is tightening up a little.
AI first
Of course, basic CPU performance has been taking a bit of a back seat over the past few years, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite also offers improvements in AI, as expected. It has an enhanced Qualcomm AI Engine with multimodal Gen AI support, which Qualcomm says leverages the Qualcomm Sensing Hub to better understand personal context. And, it has a 45% faster neural processor.
Device manufacturers, of course, will need to implement AI features for themselves — but it’s handy that the processor is capable of high-performance generative AI in the first place.
Graphics and gaming
As expected, the Snapdragon 8 Elite also has some graphics improvements. Notably, it features a new Qualcomm Adreno GPU, which features a new sliced architecture and dedicated memory for each slice. Qualcomm says this will enable AAA gaming through a 40% graphics improvement and support for Unreal Engine 5.3
AAA gaming on mobile has started to gain some traction, but it’s still up to the developers to bring their games to mobile platforms. So far, that hasn’t really happened. That said, whether console games come to mobile or not, improved graphics help make mobile games look better and will enable better mobile-first gaming.
Everything else
Other improvements to the Snapdragon 8 Elite come in the form of ISP upgrades. The ISP on the chipset can be leveraged for AI performance, recognizing objects like faces, hair, clothing, objects, and backgrounds more accurately.
Generally speaking, the Snapdragon 8 Elite represents a solid upgrade for the Snapdragon series — which makes sense. Qualcomm has likely been feeling the need to prove itself, given the fact that phone makers have started building their own chips. The best example of that is Google, which has been making its Tensor chips for Pixel phones for some time now.
Regardless, we’ll start to see phones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the next few weeks from manufacturers like ASUS, Honor, OnePlus, Samsung, and Xiaomi.
