The Snapdragon 8 Elite Aims to Supercharge Android Performance

Qualcomm’s next big mobile chip is going elite. According to the chipmaker, the Android-centric mobile offering isn’t just a step up from last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. At its big Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Qualcomm said the Snapdragon 8 Elite with its Oryon-based CPU combined with the next step in its Adreno GPU should be more powerful than any other current mobile chip, and do it with better power optimization.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is using the in-house Oryon CPU cores—now on mobile after debuting with the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus—alongside the next step in its Adreno 830 GPU for battery ray tracing on a TSMC 3nm processor. Of course, this is the era of on-device AI so Qualcomm is also claiming the next step in its Hexagon NPU should be 45% faster to support “multi-modal” AI. The real star of the show is the CPU, sporting a total of six cores with four performance cores that can reach up to 4.32 GHz clock speeds.

© Image: Qualcomm

Qualcomm released a slew of benchmarks for its new chip, but of course you shouldn’t take those at face value. Suffice it to say, Qualcomm is claiming it can beat the iPhone 16 Pro with the A18 Pro chip in multicore settings. The Snapdragon 8 Elite contains 24MB of L2 cache, though 12 MB of that is for the four performance cores. The new chip stack should support upwards of 44% better power efficiency than the last generation.

Adreno contains three slices running 1.10 GHz clock speeds. Qualcomm says the chip should support up to QHD+ resolutions at 240 Hz refresh rates. This version of Adreno should result in a stated 40% jump in performance over last year’s chip, plus a 35% increase in performance with ray tracing. It’s also the first mobile chip to support Unreal Engine 5.3 Nanite.

All of that sounds impressive. But while it can support big-name games, it still doesn’t mean your phone will be the prime way to play them. We’ll be awaiting the next slate of gaming phones to showcase the power of Snapdragon 8 Elite.

As for connectivity, the Snapdragon X Elite is housing the X80 5G Modem and support for wifi 7 on a FastConnect 7900 antenna. The other end of the chip uses Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP for photos, with claims it has better capabilities for low-light photo captures and picture sizes up to 320 MP, if any phone-maker dares to make a sensor that can support that size.

Qualcomm Hits Back at Intel Over Lunar Lake, Claims Competitor ‘Cherry Picked’ Data

Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo

At its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm came out in a fighting mood. The U.S.-based chipmaker was rubbed raw by Intel’s recent launch of its Lunar Lake chips for small, thin PCs. The company is now claiming Intel got it wrong, that its Snapdragon X Elite chips are still the best for power efficiency and performance, even if only parts of its claims actually matter for consumers’ next choice of PC.

Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon chips were supposed to be the revolution lightweight Windows PCs needed. They promised better performance than the traditional X86-based CPUs from Intel and AMD along with ludicrous battery life. To sour the mood, Intel debuted Lunar Lake, claiming it could match or beat the Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite and still make massive gains on battery life.

Competition being what it is, Qualcomm wasn’t happy with Intel’s presentation. Qualcomm’s senior director of engineering, Sriram Parthasarathy, told a panel of reporters that Intel “cherry picked” SKUs to compare its new chips to. Parthasarathy complained Intel compared its flagship chips to the Snapdragon X1E-80-100, not the X1E-84.

Among several complaints, Qualcomm said its top-end Snapdragon X Elite can outperform a top-end Intel Core Ultra 288V on Cinebench R24 single core benchmarks and outclass it in multicore settings. It also claims its middle-range X1E-80 chip can be 92% faster than the Ultra 7 256V, both tested on a Dell XPS 13 from this year.

© Photo: Artem Golub / Gizmodo

The thing is, you can’t currently find a PC housing Lunar Lake’s flagship chip, the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V. Most laptop OEMS are advertising a Core Ultra 7 256V or 258V. I’ve had a hands-on session with a Zenbook S 14 with the 256V, and can say that the performance was solid, though not necessarily overwhelming. The other big claim was that the X Elite chips are still more power efficient than the mid-range Intel variety.

Intel has routinely told reviewers its direct comparison with the Snapdragon X Elite would be the 258V, a chip that Qualcomm failed to use in this latest round of benchmark comparisons. The only thing Qualcomm has to go on for comparisons to the Ultra 9 288V is a YouTube video from PCWorld comparing multiple chips. Intel, of course, shares its own benchmarks.

All this consternation over chips is getting ridiculous. Very little about this back and forth over each company’s high-end chips impacts customers since nobody can buy a laptop with them. Qualcomm is right, it’s hard as hell to find a new ultralight PC with higher-end Lunar Lake chips. The same can be said about its X1E-84-100 version of the Snapdragon X Elite. Most systems you’ll find for sale online are going to use the X1E-78 instead, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. The only real place you can find the X1E-84 is on a Galaxy Book4 Edge, which happens to be the PC that Qualcomm used for its benchmarks.

We may eventually see a Microsoft Surface Laptop with a higher-end Lunar Lake chip, but for right now the laptop makers don’t seem to know how to sell a higher-end chip. None of this competition matters if consumers won’t ever be able to use the CPUs chipmakers launch every year.