Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite wants to turn your Android phone into a mobile powerhouse

For the last few years, Qualcomm has been the undisputed king of mobile processors — at least on the Android side of the fence. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 had its issues, ever since the swap to TSMC with a mid-cycle refresh, Qualcomm's flagship series of chipsets have married high performance and excellent efficiency. There's a reason Pixel users and Galaxy S-fans outside the US have been frustrated with their rival processors; frankly, the competition just hasn't caught up.

With its latest chip, Qualcomm is looking to lap Exynos and Tensor once again. The Snapdragon 8 Elite doesn't just have a new name — it has an entirely new CPU, leaving the company's ARM Cortex-based Kyro CPUs in the past as we rush towards 2025. With the introduction of Oryon, some surprisingly powerful gaming performance, and the all-in focus on AI you knew was coming, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite should make for some seriously powerful devices over the next 12 months. Let's just hope that marriage of performance and efficiency remains as strong as ever.

Flights and accommodations for this launch event were provided by Qualcomm, but the views within this article represent the author's own independent opinion.

Qualcomm's flagship chip has a brand new CPU

And a brand new name

Before we get into the nitty gritty, it's worth talking about what this thing is called. Despite only swapping to a generational naming scheme back in 2021, Qualcomm is not referring to this chipset as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. By borrowing from the Snapdragon X Elite, the company is directly throwing its Oryon-based products into one basket, a move that mostly makes sense. According to Qualcomm, "Elite" is reserved for its best products, and this chipset has a brand new visual design to go along with it.

Still, I'm stuck wondering what this means for future Snapdragon 8-series models, as well as Qualcomm's lower tier chipsets. Will we get a Snapdragon 8 Plus? A Snapdragon 7 Elite? The previous naming structure was already getting pretty messy with the introduction of Plus and "S" models, and I can't imagine we're headed in a clearer direction. Qualcomm, for its part, says it doesn't comment on future products.

We've known Oryon was set to debut on mobile since last year, when Qualcomm first debuted its custom CPU within its Snapdragon X Elite chipset for laptops. Reviewers seemed pretty wowed with this summer's first slate of next-gen ARM laptops, and now, that power is coming to the chipset running within some of the world's most popular smartphones. Frankly, I think it's refreshing that, for the first time in a while, there's something to be excited about in a new chipset that's a little more tangible than AI support.

It's impossible to talk CPUs without getting pretty nerdy, so here's what you need to know. Once again, Qualcomm's using an 8-core CPU, but with the swap to Oryon, it's a completely custom architecture. This year's chip features two prime cores running at 4.32GHz — a massive jump in clock speed compared to its predecessor — along with six 3.53GHz performance cores. That's right: Efficiency cores are officially a thing of the past.

Qualcomm says that the swap to custom cores rather than relying on ARM's Cortex line, along with the move to TSMC's second-gen 3nm process, will deliver up to 44 percent better efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, despite the higher clock speeds. Of course, we'll have to actually try this chip out on real smartphones — like the upcoming Galaxy S25 — before we know just how well it performs.

As my colleague Matt Sholtz has covered in the past, mobile gaming is in a seriously weird spot. The Play Store is filled with low-quality efforts and gacha games, and the App Store — despite modern console ports from Capcom and Ubisoft — isn't faring much better. Nevertheless, Qualcomm continues to provide partners with all of the power they need to bring premium titles to Android, and with its latest Adreno GPU, that's truer than ever.

On paper, the Snapdragon 8 Elite provides a 40 percent improvement to overall gaming performance and a 35 percent improvement to ray tracing. Support for Unreal Engine 5 Nanite — which can provide "film-quality 3D environments in mobile games" — as well as Unreal's Chaos Physics engine should allow for bigger budget, higher fidelity games to make it over here (and leaves me begging Microsoft for a Crackdown port). And much like Oryon, it sounds like Adreno is delivering improved efficiency, allowing for up to two and a half hours of extended gaming time on a single charge,.

Perhaps understanding the industry's current critiques of mobile gaming, Qualcomm is partnering with the development team behind Grid Legends to improve that title's performance and visuals on upcoming smartphones. I hope this team continues to work with Play Store devs — more support can only be good for Android.

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As usual, everything is all about AI

On-device AI, to be specific

AI discussions took up nearly half of the Qualcomm briefing I attended, and while we'll have to wait to see how OEMs and other developers utilize the tools announced today, it does sound like an impressive jump in performance. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is focused on delivering improved performance for multimodal generative AI experiences, more specifically through support for on-device LLMs. While I'm not sure I buy Qualcomm's vision of a complete revolution for how we think of smartphones today, if you're into the sorts of tools companies like Google are building with Gemini, you should find plenty more of these features running without the cloud.

Qualcomm cites a 45 percent faster Hexagon NPU and 45 percent improved performance per watt as the driving forces behind the changes this generation, but the focus on multimodal is where my attention is focused. With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, developers can now bypass the need to convert your speech into text for the LLM to understand, theoretically speeding up commands and queries. I'll need to see this in action before I fully buy in.

If you thought the conversations around "what is a photo" were annoying before, just you wait. Practically everything about Qualcomm's new imaging toolset on the Snapdragon 8 Elite has to do with AI, right down to the ISP. Qualcomm's new "AI ISP" is designed to deliver streamlined post-processing on practically all of your images, thanks to a direct link right into the Hexagon NPU. AI-based pet capture, video object eraser, and real-time Insight AI are some of the tools highlighted with this year's launch, though as always, it'll be up to OEMs to support these tools.

While it's true that some skepticism should be reserved for all of Qualcomm's AI promises — I would disagree with the company that we've seen a revolution in mobile computing in the AI era — nowhere is that side eye more worthy than in the Snapdragon 8 Elite's networking prowess. I have absolutely no doubt that this year's modem will be as speedy as ever, as Qualcomm knows its way around creating some of the best in the business. Rather, it's the AI buzzwords that I find myself struggling to come to terms with.

In addition to real improvements like an upgrade to Bluetooth 6.0 support, the Snapdragon 8 Elite now supports, and I'm quoting here, "AI-enhanced 5G and Wi-Fi connectivity." I'm sure there's some truth to this, as Qualcomm says this software-based improvement should deliver a stronger signal and more responsive connectivity.

But just as we've seen "machine learning" tools transform into AI skills overnight, I have a hard time believing there's some level of magic here that will suddenly make connecting to 5G or Wi-Fi feel entirely new. At the very least, Qualcomm promises its FastConnect 7900 chip uses 40 percent less power than last generation — now that's a change you might actually feel.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is finally here

But we still have plenty of unanswered questions

Source: Qualcomm

In a briefing shared before Snapdragon Summit this week, Qualcomm called its latest chip a "quantum leap forward." While it's easy to remain skeptical about some of the company's claims before smartphones are out in the wild, I have no doubt that, on paper, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is a seriously impressive chip. I'll be seeing demos of exactly what this power can do throughout Summit using reference devices, so check back at Android Police to learn exactly what your next smartphone might be capable of.