What you’ll want to know
- Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, a 3nm TSMC-made SoC, at its annual summit on Monday.
- It has two 4.32GHz prime cores and 6 3.53GHz efficiency cores, together with 5.3Gbps LPDDR5X reminiscence.
- Qualcomm guarantees its new Oryon CPU presents a forty five% single- and multi-core efficiency enhance with a 44% effectivity enhance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
- Its GPU and NPU efficiency have additionally improved by 40% and 45%, respectively.
When you discover Qualcomm’s naming scheme for its chips complicated, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is known as to make issues apparent: That is its quickest system-on-a-chip (SoC) but, constructed to make flagship Android telephones extra highly effective than ever.
Introduced on the Qualcomm Summit 2024 in Maui, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is the primary to make use of a customized Oryon CPU as a substitute of the same old ARM Cortex cores. In contrast to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, it will not have any low-clocked effectivity chips, both: its six efficiency cores hit 3.53GHz, which is quicker than the three.3GHz Cortex-X4 discovered within the last-gen SoC. And its two prime cores will hit a blazing 4.32GHz.
As you’d anticipate, this results in a forty five% enhance in single- and multi-core efficiency over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it is 44% extra environment friendly at hitting the identical high benchmarks. We’ll need to see how the Snapdragon 8 Elite does for low-power effectivity, however Qualcomm implied throughout a media session that its efficiency cores would don’t have any hassle on that entrance.
Unsurprisingly, Qualcomm emphasizes the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s AI boosts during the last era as nicely: a forty five% quicker NPU and 45% higher efficiency per watt. It will allow standard LMMs like Llama and Gemini to combine “immediately” onto telephones for fast multi-modal AI era.
Qualcomm guarantees that these AI enhancements will assist particularly for higher 5G connectivity. The brand new Snapdragon X80 pairs with the AI Suite Gen 3 that is meant to enhance energy dealing with, protection, latency, QoS, mmWave beam administration, and GNSS location, with a particular 30% location accuracy enhance “even in parking buildings.”
The Snapdragon 8 Elite jumps to Bluetooth 6.0, which was solely introduced this September and presents some key upgrades to safety and “distance consciousness.” And it immediately integrates Extremely Wideband for precision discovering and digital key tech.
Qualcomm did not specify which Adreno GPU will probably be within the Snapdragon 8 Elite, however it did promise a 40% efficiency pace enhance, 40% energy financial savings, and 35% elevated ray tracing efficiency. It has three GPU slices clocked at 1.1GHz and 12MB graphics reminiscence.
As for different refined adjustments, the Snapdragon 8 Elite helps QHD+ decision as much as 240Hz refresh charges, which may supply some extremely easy gaming experiences to go along with the graphics enhance. And we may start to see 320MP digicam sensors for the primary time.
Though everybody assumed the Snapdragon 8 Elite could be referred to as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, Qualcomm determined to offer it the identical “Elite” moniker because the Snapdragon X Elite that it constructed for PCs.
Other than saying it “deserves a brand new identify” due to its customized CPU, Qualcomm would not make clear whether or not future “Elite” SoCs would maintain the “Gen X” label or if non-Elite Snapdragon flagship chips with Arm cores would proceed, saying it would not speak about its future roadmap.
Earlier this month, MediaTek revealed the Dimensity 9400 SoC with one 3.62GHz Cortex core, three 3.3GHz efficiency cores, and 4 2.4GHz effectivity cores, all constructed on the identical TSMC N3E course of.
In comparison with the Dimensity 9300, its efficiency hole—35% and 28% quicker single- and multi-core efficiency with 40% higher effectivity, plus 41% improved GPU energy—is not that far off from the good points Qualcomm obtained with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, despite the fact that the clock speeds have a major hole.
MediaTek says the Dimensity 9400 hit 3,055/9,600 for a Geekbench 6.2 take a look at or 2.8 million for AnTuTu. Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Elite hits 3,222 / 10,444 on Geekbench 6.3 or 3 million for AnTuTu.
Qualcomm wins the benchmark battle, and it does so with its personal Oryon cores as a substitute of paying for Arm’s. However you is perhaps shocked that the hole is not wider, given simply how excessive the 8 Elite clock pace is. We’ll need to get ahold of telephones utilizing each chips and see how they carry out in the true world earlier than we are able to choose for sure.
