The Snapdragon 8 Elite looks to beat the iPhone 16 and Qualcomm claims it’s still beating Intel’s Lunar Lake.
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.
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.
