Forget Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 – Qualcomm’s Apple A18 Pro rival is the Snapdragon 8 Elite

It’s that time of year again: Qualcomm has debuted its new-and-improved flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii.

Essentially a renamed version of the much rumored Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (though Qualcomm isn’t ready to confirm as much just yet), the 8 Elite is a de facto successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and will likely power the Samsung Galaxy S25, OnePlus 13, and many more of the best phones we expect to see released in 2025.

“Our flagship mobile platforms are now taking on the Elite name, showcasing the remarkable progress it represents for the industry,” Qualcomm said in a statement announcing the launch, which comes just a month after Apple and Meditek unveiled their latest flagship chipsets – the A18 Pro and Dimensity 9400, respectively.

The 8 Elite is the first Snapdragon mobile chipset to feature Qualcomm’s second-generation Oryon CPU, and has been designed to “handle the complexities of multi-modal AI” better than any mobile chipset before it. In other words, next year’s best Android phones will surely rank among the best AI phones, too.

Forgive us for getting technical, but the Oryon’s two prime CPU cores boast peak speeds of 4.32GHz – supposedly the fastest in the industry – and six new performance cores that each boast peak speeds of 3.53GHz. Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipset also does away with efficiency cores, two of which feature in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

What does all that mean in layman’s terms? Well, since the CPU in mobile chipsets is used for application processing, any phones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite should deliver faster app launches, more seamless multitasking, and more powerful generative AI capabilities than their Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-equipped predecessors.

Mobile chipsets also feature a GPU for graphics processing (read: gaming – more on this below) and an NPU for machine learning (ML) applications, though Qualcomm is most jazzed about the addition of its Oryon CPU, saying: “The Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform represents the pinnacle of Snapdragon innovation. With Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuting in our mobile roadmap, we are delivering unprecedented performance. This significance deserves a new, special, most premium variant of our leading 8 series.”

A gift for gamers

When it comes to gaming, next year’s flagship Android handsets could threaten the iPhone 16 Pro Max as the best gaming phone.

The Andreno GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite boasts Qualcomm’s first-ever sliced architecture, which facilitates a higher clock speed, higher frame rate, and better battery efficiency – that means sharper images, smoother gameplay, and longer gameplay sessions – than the GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Andreno can also store 12MB of data directly on the GPU, sending less graphical data to the chipset’s DDR memory.

What’s more, the Snapdragon 8 Elite supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, which allows for the rendering of up to 9,000 unique objects and the destruction of up to 1,000 objects in under 5ms of latency. Similarly, support for Unreal Engine’s Nanite solution will supposedly facilitate a “massive increase” in geometric complexity and the rendering of “film-quality environments in your mobile game” – let’s just hope Qualcomm isn’t referring to recent Marvel movies there, eh?

There is, of course, plenty more to say about the Snapdragon 8 Elite – and we’ll be reporting on several never-before-seen features throughout our week on the ground at Snapdragon Summit – but for now, all you need to know is that the next wave of flagship Android phones will pack a serious punch; provided, that is, Samsung et al can make good use of all that lovely power. Here’s hoping!

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