11 hours Ago By Alexander Maxham
Today in Maui, Qualcomm took the wraps off of its newest silicon – Snapdragon 8 Elite . That’s right, a new name to go along with the world’s fastest chipset in a phone. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite can reach clock speeds of 4.
32GHz, which is incredible. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was capped at 3.4GHz, and the newest competitor – MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 – only hits 3.
63GHz. So this is a major advantage for Qualcomm. But the real question is, what can you do with all that speed on a phone? Two letters, AI.
That’s right, this faster speed is going to allow the Snapdragon 8 Elite to do more AI tasks and do them faster. Of course, having a 45% faster NPU helps in that regard. Qualcomm calls the Snapdragon 8 Elite a “Generative AI Powerhouse.
” It includes the fastest Hexagon NPU yet and an on-device multimodal-gen AI assistant. Snapdragon 8 Elite could mean huge gains in battery life Typically, year-over-year gains are pretty small on processors these days. But that’s not the case with Qualcomm and the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
Of course, a big part of that is likely due to the entirely rebuilt second-generation Oryon cores being used here. Qualcomm is touting a 45% improvement on the CPU, 40% on the GPU and 45% AI performance per watt, when compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 . That brings the overall improvement to about 27% on the SoC.
When it comes to the Oryon CPU specifically, it has a 45% improvement on single-core and multi-core, 62% on web browsing and it also has a much larger cache this year, at 24MB. Technically, Qualcomm is doing two 12MB L2 caches here. This all results in massive power savings on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, even though it is still using the N3E process from TSMC for this 3nm node.
That’s going to result in additional battery life among all Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered devices. Speaking of those devices, Qualcomm says that we should see devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite in “the coming weeks” from a slew of manufacturers. These include ASUS, HONOR , iQOO, OnePlus , OPPO , RealMe, Samsung , Vivo, Xiaomi , and more are on the way.
Interestingly, Qualcomm actually mentioned Samsung, but they normally don’t, despite Samsung always using Snapdragon on its flagship phones..
