In October last year, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset was introduced, featuring a CPU with a prime Cortex-X4 core clocked at up to 3.3GHz. The chipset powered a ton of Android flagships this year, and today we got its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The new chipset offers massive performance improvements over its predecessor, and maybe that’s the reason why Qualcomm decided to use a different naming style.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is built on the TSMC’s 3nm process, which means it is more power efficient than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm says the CPU is 44% more power efficient and the GPU is 40% more power efficient than the 8 Gen 3. The chipset comes with the all-new Oryon CPU, versus the Kryo CPU, which we have seen in the previous Qualcomm chipsets. This new CPU can go up to 4.32GHz. Speaking of the core configuration, there are two cores clocked at up to 4.32GHz and six cores clocked at up to 3.53GHz.
Qualcomm says the CPU performance is improved by up to 45% on both single-core and multi-core. The CPU features 24MB of L2 cache, with the two Prime cores using 12MB and the rest of the six cores using 12MB as well.
In terms of the GPU, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has the Adreno 830 GPU, which is said to offer up to 40% better performance than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The ray tracing performance is improved by up to 35%. The GPU uses a new “Sliced” architecture, and there are three GPU slices, each clocked at up to 1.1GHz. The GPU supports Unreal Engine, Nanite, Chaos Engine, etc.
As for the AI performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite has the fastest Qualcomm Hexagon NPU ever, 45% faster than the previous generation.
Other specifications include the X80 5G modem, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, WiFi 7, Integrated UWB, etc.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite will power most of the Android flagships launching in the coming months and next year.