Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Chip Will Make Your Phone Less Annoying

5 days ago 4

Chief among Qualcomm's newest chips is the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring more AI features and faster speeds to next year's top-tier Android phones. The chip was announced at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 alongside Qualcomm's other new products. Apart from AI, some of the best things it can do are far more humble than artificial intelligence: It'll fix several pain points and make using phones less irritating.

Though most of the stage time at Snapdragon Summit was dedicated to big-picture advancements — there was much forecasting of how people will use smartphones differently with what are being called "AI Agents" — the more mundane improvements will start affecting people's phone use the moment folks buy an Android phone that's packing the new Snapdragon 8 Elite.

This smattering of quality-of-life features covers a grab bag of topics, but three rise to the top: improving web browsing, extending wireless audio from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, and using generative AI to apply an artificial light source in your selfies.

We're in our first year of generative AI on smartphones, and despite being inundated with promises of how much it'll change our mobile life, the most we've gotten is a handful of cool tricks on phones like those in the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and the Google Pixel 9 family. Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in the iPhone 16 series, hasn't launched yet, a month after the phones came out — a few Apple Intelligence features are slated to drop next week.

So it's refreshing to see new features in the Snapdragon 8 Elite that'll make the way we currently use phones a bit easier.

A feature on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite 8 chip helps with dark faces in selfies.

AI artificial light source: Dim selfie-face, begone!

The coolest annoyance-killing improvement is a camera feature powered by generative AI. Instead of removing elements a la Google Pixel's Magic Eraser, this one adds light where it's needed most: on your face.

The feature, meant for selfies, acts like a directional, soft light source that can illuminate parts of your face darkened by shadow. Once you turn it on, you can tap and hold to move the light around, choosing the angle that most flatters you and fits your surroundings. And if you're in a creative mood, you can dial the intensity up or down, or even shift the color of the artificial light along the RGB spectrum.

Watch this: Snapdragon 8 Elite Adds AI Selfie Video Lighting and Faster Web Browsing

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I got to play with the feature in a demo, and it felt delightfully fun and helpful. I imagine it would be most useful for balancing out brightly backlit situations, like when you're standing in front of a sunset or sitting inside with an outdoor vista behind you. Though I tried this feature on a reference device, I'm excited by the potential to fix faulty photos and make up for cameras that can't yet handle light and darkness.

Faster web browsing speeds up apps, too

In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment during the Snapdragon Summit keynote presentation, Qualcomm presenters noted that the Snapdragon 8 Elite made web browsing faster. While that's exactly what it sounds like — web pages load faster — it's also true that a lot of phone operations rely on connecting to the web. Currently, many smartphone apps load web browsing information in the background while you navigate their interface.

"Browsing doesn't just mean opening up a browser and getting particular information," Manju Varma, director of product management focused on CPU technology at Qualcomm, told me at the summit. "The applications will use data for researching, getting sports and entertainment news, shopping — all this entails what we call browsing."

The micro architecture in the new Oryon central processing unit, coming in Qualcomm's mobile chips for the first time with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, enables this speed boost. As a result, cache capacity is increased and memory hierarchy optimized for real-world uses like browsing data on apps. Switching between apps faster is another benefit from the browsing data speed boost.

Two phones showing improved browsing speeds from Qualcomm's Qualcomm Snapragon Elite 8 chip.

At the summit, Qualcomm set up demo rooms for attendees to test these new features for themselves. One station showed a simple test for faster browsing that had two phones running Browser Bench's online Speedometer 3.0 test, which has machines run through browsing tasks. The Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device (not a commercially available phone) scored 33.7, while the device running last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored 16.1. For the sake of comparison, an iPhone 16 Pro scored 29.6, and my own iPhone 15 Pro Max scored 29.7. (The numbers are just a comparative metric and don't represent any specific rate of browser processing, but higher numbers mean better performance.)

This improved browsing speed will, yes, even enhance forthcoming generative AI tasks as well as gaming, said Karl Whealton, Qualcomm's senior director of product management focusing on CPU and neural processing unit.

"CPU is in everything," Whealton said. "Every single thing runs CPU. Some things run it a little bit; some things run it a lot. But everything you do is going to be improved."

Xpan takes audio beyond Bluetooth for fewer drops

Last year's Snapdragon Summit was also dominated by generative AI, as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the first to get the new technology. One feature that chip didn't get but that was also introduced a year ago, XPAN, will debut on the Snapdragon 8 Elite — and it should make dropped audio over Bluetooth less common.

Put simply, XPAN lets audio transition from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. This should allow you to roam far away from the source of your music or podcasts and still hear them, so long as your headphones or speaker are on the same Wi-Fi network as the phone or computer they're connected to.

During this year's summit, one demo featured XPAN in action. In front of me was a wireless speaker that was blasting music — a pop tune heard over the din of the demo room — streamed from a phone over a hundred feet away. To illustrate, the demo had a camera pointed at the phone, which was at the other end of the building.

This demo showed one scenario, and I'd be interested to see how XPAN handles other hurdles that normally hinder a Bluetooth signal, like solid walls and increased distance. But if it works, that's one less annoyance you'll have to deal with as your local Wi-Fi network serves as a backup to ensure your music and podcasts don't drop out. This could be a godsend for people in homes and workplaces riddled with building materials that are unfriendly to Bluetooth signals.

Each of these three features has the potential to make phones easier to use. Probably the most common complaint every smartphone owner has is, Why doesn't this feature just work? But let's face it: A lot of stuff does. It's the growing complexity of smartphones and of our interconnected web of devices that make it harder for features to live up to expectations.

This applies to hardware and software. Connecting Bluetooth headphones and speakers used to be a challenge, but now we expect it to be quick and seamless. And it was a revelation to learn that apps could harness all of a phone's sensors, like the gyroscope and GPS. The new frontier is people's expectation that all their data can easily be shared between apps, whether that's health information, passwords or subscriptions.

So when companies come along and make it a bit easier for something to work in the background, or they add a camera feature that seems like a no-brainer in hindsight, that's of course a good thing: It takes a little bit of the friction out of living our lives through our pocket supercomputers.

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