Qualcomm officially launches its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip
Information and rumors regarding the brand new Snapdragon chip are not new, but here it is finally made official. Last year, during the Snapdragon Summit, we were able to discover the Snapdragon X Elite and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This year, the firm is unveiling the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which, as its name suggests, offers performance between the X Elite and 8 Gen 3. This implies big changes for the next smartphones equipped with the processor.
Impressive performance
On the architecture side, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is an SoC, which this time offers new Oryon cores (as for the Snapdragon X Elite), developed specifically to meet the needs of smartphones. Thus, they benefit from greater power, while allowing a significant reduction in energy consumption. To illustrate, Qualcomm shared a festival of figures of all kinds: we understand that with equal performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite consumes 45% less energy by the CPU, 40% less by the GPU, 47% in less for the NPU and finally 20% less by the image coprocessor. And as a whole, the SoC consumes 17% less.
Note that these drastic reductions in consumption are directly linked to the 3nm engraving of the chip (unlike the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, with its 4nm). In terms of performance, this new processor benefits from a significant boost: composed of 8 cores (6 high-performance and 2 ultra-high-performance), the two high-performance cores can go up to 4.32 GHz while the other six can reach 3.53 GHz. And to accompany this improved performance on the CPU side, the GPU is also entitled to its new features. Thus, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first SoC for smartphones to be compatible with Nanite from Unreal Engine.
Furthermore, in a world where artificial intelligence is increasingly important, the NPU benefits from a 45% increase in performance compared to Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. At the same time, the Hexagon image coprocessor now allows three 48 megapixel cameras to be managed simultaneously, which corresponds to a performance boost of 35% more than last year: this will make it possible to better isolate objects in photos or videos (and in particular to delete them if necessary). Furthermore, the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor will obviously be Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7 compatible.
Many new smartphone models will soon take advantage of this Snapdragon 8 Elite processor: the OnePlus 13, the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, the ASUS ROG Phone 9 should all benefit from it very soon, before the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra get our hands on it early next year.
