Chipmaker Qualcomm, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, has now revealed the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its latest flagship mobile chip. The company describes it as “the most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever,” and is set to come to high-end smartphones from leading manufacturers such as Samsung, OnePlus, Motorola, and Xiaomi in the coming weeks.
AI remains the focal point of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Qualcomm aims to use this chip to take generative AI on mobile phones to new heights. The company notes that the chip will make “on-device multi-modal generative AI applications a reality on smartphones,” and comes with a real-time camera assistant that can recognize objects as users capture photos or record videos. Alongside this comes support for up to 320MP camera sensors and AI-driven tools that are integrated into the image signal processor (ISP) to allow real-time for camera adjustments. The Snapdragon 8 Elite also builds upon Qualcomm’s previous breakthroughs in AI and is set to handle text, audio, and visual data simultaneously to provide answers to prompts on-device.
With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm is also shifting from Kryo CPUs to its custom-designed Oryon CPU. This is fabricated using a 3-nanometer process and promises to bring a rise of 45% in overall performance and a boost of 44% in power efficiency. In the chip, there are two two prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and six performance cores reaching up to 3.53 GHz, and the company claims that they provide an increase of 62% increase in web performance. In addition to this, the Adreno GPU has undergone a revamp to gain a “sliced” architecture, and will support Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system. The chip will be a boon for gamers as well, and they will experience smoother gameplay with higher framerates, as well as a longer gaming time by as much as 2.5 hours.
“We are so excited to bring the power of Qualcomm Oryon to our Snapdragon mobile platforms for the first time. Earlier this year we debuted it in PCs, delivering remarkable experiences and unparallel battery life to PC users, energizing the industry and getting the attention of consumers. Today, our second generation of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship Mobile Platform – it’s a major leap forward and we expect consumers to be thrilled with the new experiences enabled by our CPU technology” Chris Patrick, Senior Vice President and General Manager of mobile handsets at Qualcomm, commented on the matter.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite also comes with an upgraded Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), which is said to offer up to 45% faster AI performance than its predecessor. The NPU is capable of processing more than 70 tokens per second, and comes with support for on-device multimodal AI assistants. “With leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency 3. In addition, it revolutionizes mobile experiences by offering personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritizing user privacy,” Patrick added.
