Qualcomm Snapdragon summit: Get ready for the next gen flagship smartphones
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The stage for the next wave of flagship smartphone wars has been set.
Just weeks after rivals Apple and MediaTek unveiled their flagship A18 Pro and Dimensity 9400 chips, Qualcomm has lifted the covers from its latest top-shelf Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chip at last week’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. This is the same chip that will power the best phones from Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo and many more in the months to come.
If the nomenclature sounds unfamiliar, that’s because Qualcomm has eschewed the typical “Gen" naming, borrowing the Elite branding and bits and pieces of the Oryon CPU, from its X Elite laptop chipset. Evidently, the company isn’t pulling any punches, serving up big upgrades for flagship smartphones, but what does it bring to the table for you and me? As it turns out, quite a lot.
To be clear, the Oryon CPU inside the 8 Elite hasn’t been directly lifted from the Qualcomm’s laptop chips, instead using a second-gen Oryon chip optimized for mobile use. Like Apple’s A18 silicon, the 8 Elite is built on a 3-nanometer process, instead of the 4-nanometer process for last year’s chips, which allows transistors to be packed closer together for better power efficiency and performance.
The desktop-like performance inspiration is clear—the new chip architecture has two ‘prime’ cores running at 4.3GHz and six performance running at 3.53GHz, forgoing the efficiency cores of yore to deliver 45 percent faster single-core and multi-core tasks, all the while using 27% less power than the already efficient Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. AI tasks aren’t ignored, with the upgraded Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) supporting on-device multimodal AI assistants with the ability to handle both
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