The Snapdragon 8 Elite has finally been announced, and it’s looking like the biggest step forward for Android phones in a long time.
Qualcomm has been hyping up the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 since last year, confirming that it would be the first Snapdragon smartphone chip with a custom Oryon CPU. Now, the company has revealed the new processor, and it’s actually called the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
The new processor is expected to power tons of flagship Android smartphones at the end of the year and in 2025. So, what are the most significant improvements? Here’s what you should know.The CPU is a major leap forward for smartphones (on paper)
The Snapdragon 8 Elite is indeed the first smartphone processor with the firm’s custom Oryon CPU cores, as the company ditches off-the-shelf Arm CPU designs for the first time since 2016. Expect an octa-core CPU featuring two so-called prime cores and six performance cores. Yep, Qualcomm has finally ditched little or efficiency cores, in line with arch-rival MediaTek. It’s also worth noting that it isn’t using different cores for the prime and performance cores as they share the same microarchitecture. However, Qualcomm told us that the prime cores are tuned for single-threaded tasks while the performance cores are optimized for multi-threaded workloads.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s prime CPU cores clock in at a screaming 4.32GHz, which might be a new high for commercial smartphone chips. Meanwhile, the performance cores top out at a still impressive 3.53GHz. The firm is also offering 12MB of L2 cache for each core cluster. The clock speed boost, the switch to a custom CPU, more cache, and the move to TSMC’s 3nm process result in a CPU that’s up to 44% more efficient than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU. Qualcomm also claims a 45% boost to single-core and multi-core performance.
All of this makes for a very impressive CPU upgrade on paper. However, we’ll need to wait for final benchmarks and commercial devices to see whether we are indeed looking at the new performance king of smartphones.It gets a big GPU boost too
The Snapdragon 8 Elite’s CPU is certainly getting a lot of attention, but the processor’s GPU has also received some significant upgrades. For starters, the company has switched to a so-called sliced architecture, which sees the shader cores and fixed function blocks moved into individual slices for more flexible resource allocation. These slices also enjoy their own individual clock speeds.
These improvements translate into a claimed 40% faster performance, 40% power savings, and 35% faster ray tracing performance. Qualcomm asserts that this improved efficiency, in particular, means gaming sessions can last up to 2.5 hours longer. But again, we’ll need to put all of this to the test with real-world devices.
These aren’t the only notable gaming-related announcements from Qualcomm. The chip designer also confirmed that the Snapdragon 8 Elite supports Unreal Engine 5’s Chaos physics engine and Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite developer solution to create games with a ton of geometric detail.
