Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Chip Aims to Level Up AI on Android Phones

Next year's top Android phones should have even better AI capabilities and low-light camera performance and will be able to last longer when playing games. At its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm revealed the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the next generation of chips that will power the best phones from Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus and more manufacturers.

The new chip will enable even more generative AI capabilities, which became the showcase feature that tech companies scrambled to integrate into their products this year. The smartphone industry had its own competitive race toward generative AI starting with the Galaxy AI-equipped Samsung Galaxy S24 in January, while the iPhone 16 series is set to get parts of Apple Intelligence in a future update. While nascent with only a few standout features thus far, Qualcomm's next chip aims to support more features that will give users even more reason to buy Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phones.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite builds on the foundation laid by Qualcomm's previous chip, last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which was the company's first chip capable of generative AI capabilities. The new chip includes even more AI expertise, such as support for an AI assistant to use the camera to recognize objects in real time, and a new trick that generates lighting so that your artificially well-lit face shows up in videos with bright backgrounds. That's in addition to features that were available on the previous-generation chip, like image generation through Stable Diffusion and expanding photos beyond their original boundaries.

The chip has an improved neural processing unit, with more cores resulting, in what Qualcomm claims, is up to 45% faster AI performance and better power efficiency. The NPU now integrates multimodal generative AI applications on the device, meaning it can handle inputs from multiple sensors and data sources (audio, video, personal info and more) to answer queries. 

The 8 Elite can support more than 70 tokens per second, a metric for how many inputs (text, photos and so on) can be considered when answering queries.

Qualcomm

While the previous three years of Qualcomm top-tier chips were Snapdragon Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3, the Snapdragon 8 Elite breaks from its naming convention to signify it's the best of the best, Qualcomm says. That's because the 8 Elite is the first of the company's mobile chips to use the new Qualcomm-designed Oryon CPU. To wit, the company introduced its Snapdragon X Elite PC chips a year ago, which were the first to pack Oryon CPUs.

The 8 Elite uses a second-generation Oryon CPU with a 3-nanometer process (smaller than the 4nm of last year's Kryo CPU), which helps enable the chip's 45% greater efficiency. Upgrades in chip architecture have led to 45% better overall performance, but the more interesting benefit is a 62% improvement in web browsing performance -- meaning consumers should see websites and web-based apps load faster.

"I think we've all experienced one time or another that a website, even though your phone is great, slows down and is labored. So [the Oryon CPU] is going to provide a [browsing] experience that rivals any kind of desktop," Chris Patrick, a Qualcomm senior vice president and general manager of the mobile handset division, said in a briefing.

This won't just make it faster to load websites. Many modern apps and software rely on web browsing, so having a CPU designed to speed that up will have knock-on improvements to services consumers use every day. 

That improved efficiency applies to high-intensity activities like gaming, and Qualcomm says its new chip enables up to 2.5 hours of additional playtime. 

The Snapdragon 8 Elite also improves camera performance, mainly through a new ISP with better AI touches on autofocus, white balance and exposure, all of which happens behind the scenes and should result in better photos. The NPU can also now directly access the camera sensors themselves for real-time enhancements, including for video. Phonemakers can plug their camera algorithms directly into this pipeline.  

The 8 Elite also has a round of connectivity improvements mainly due to -- you guessed it -- AI. The X80 5G Modem uses AI on multiantenna management to better juggle signals for clearer connections, while the FastConnect 7900 integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to reduce latency. This makes it possible for calls leaving Bluetooth range to hand off the connection to Wi-Fi to keep the call going. 

We'll have to wait until new phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite actually launch to see how much of a difference the new chip makes. But based on Qualcomm's claims, it sounds like the chip should bring a mix of general and AI-fueled upgrades to the next generation of Android phones.