The Snapdragon 8 Elite aims to boost Android performance

Qualcomm’s next big mobile chip is becoming the 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 that 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 mobile chip today and do with better power optimization.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite uses the internal cores of the Oryon CPU, now in mobile after debuting with the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, along with the next step of its Adreno 830 GPU for battery ray tracing in a processor 3nm TSMC. Of course, this is the era of on-device AI, so Qualcomm also claims that 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, with a total of six cores with four performance cores that can reach clock speeds of up to 4.32GHz.

Qualcomm released a bunch of benchmarks for its new chip, but of course you shouldn’t take them at face value. Suffice it to say that Qualcomm claims it can beat the iPhone 16 Pro with the A18 Pro chip in multi-core configurations. The Snapdragon 8 Elite contains 24MB of L2 cache, although 12MB is for the four performance cores. The new chip stack should support more than 44% more power efficiency than the last generation.

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

This all sounds impressive. But even though it might be compatible with big-name games, it still doesn’t mean your phone is the best way to play them. We’ll be waiting for the next list of gaming phones to showcase the power of the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon X Elite houses the X80 5G modem and Wi-Fi 7 support on a FastConnect 7900 antenna. The other end of the chip uses Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP for photos, with claims to have better low-light photo capture capabilities and image sizes up to 320MP, if any phone maker dares to make a sensor that can support that size.

Qualcomm Reacts to Intel Over Lunar Lake, Claims Competitor ‘Cherry Picked’ Data

At its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm came out in a fighting mood. The US-based chipmaker was rubbed raw by Intel’s recent launch of its Lunar Lake chips for small, thin PCs. The company now claims that Intel was 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 the next option of consumer PCs.

Qualcomm’s ARM-based Snapdragon chips were supposed to be the revolution lightweight Windows PCs needed. They promised better performance than traditional X86-based CPUs from Intel and AMD along with ridiculous battery life. To add to the mood, Intel debuted Lunar Lake, claiming it could match or beat the Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite and still make massive gains in 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 group of reporters that Intel “picked” the SKUs to compare its new chips. Parthasarathy complained that Intel was comparing its flagship chips to the Snapdragon X1E-80-100, not the X1E-84.

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

The thing is, you can’t currently find a PC with Lunar Lake’s flagship chip, the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V. Most laptop OEMs advertise 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 performance was solid, though not necessarily overwhelming. The other big claim was that the X Elite chips are still more efficient than the mid-range Intel variety.

Intel has routinely told critics that its direct comparison to the Snapdragon X Elite would be the 258V, a chip that Qualcomm didn’t use in this latest round of benchmark comparisons. The only thing Qualcomm has to go on to compare to the Ultra 9 288V is a YouTube video from PCWorld that compares various chips. Intel, of course, shares its own benchmarks.

All this consternation about chips is getting ridiculous. Very little of this back-and-forth about each company’s high-end chips affects customers, since no one can buy a laptop with them. Qualcomm is right, it’s hard to find a new ultralight PC with high-end Lunar Lake chips. The same can be said for its X1E-84-100 version of the Snapdragon X Elite. Most systems you’ll find for sale online will use the X1E-78, such as the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. The only real place you can find the X1E-84 is in a Galaxy Book4 Edge, which happens to be the computer Qualcomm used for its benchmarks.

We may eventually see a Microsoft Surface Laptop with a high-end Lunar Lake chip, but for now laptop makers don’t seem to know how to sell a high-end chip. None of that competition matters if consumers will never be able to use the CPUs that chipmakers release every year.