Qualcomm just introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its first Oryon-based smartphone mobile platform, bringing breakthrough AI, gaming, and imaging performance.
Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit is currently underway in sunny Hawaii, and the chipmaker is hitting hard right out of the gate. The company is best-known for its Snapdragon SoCs in smartphones and tablets, and the latest iteration promises to be the fastest and most efficient yet. The Snapdragon 8 Elite bursts onto the scene with CPU cores based on Oryon along with the newest in Adreno graphics, Hexagon NPUs for AI, and photography image signal processing that should take smartphone imaging to the next level. Snapdragon 8 Elite: Oryon In the Palm of Your Hand
The Snapdragon 8 Elite marks the Oryon CPU architecture’s first entry into smartphones. If you recall, the Oryon CPU architecture debuted in the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus, which powered the initial wave Copilot+ enabled Windows PC. The Snapdragon 8 Elite, however, features an updated 2nd Generation Oryon architecture, enhanced and tooled specifically for smartphone applications. Much like Apple has done in the transition from its M4 in the iPad Pro to the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro, Qualcomm is migrating its top performance architecture to the most ubiquitious computing devices we have—our smartphones. That’s good news, because Oryon is a big step up over previous generation CPUs from the company in terms of features, efficiency, and performance.
Last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 had a pretty complex design. It came with a single «prime» core, which was a Cortex X4, multiple speed grades of different Cortex A720 cores, and finally a pair of Cortex A520 efficiency cores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite eschews that complexity in favor of a pair of Oryon prime cores clocked at up to 4.32GHz and six performance CPU cores clocked at a maximum of 3.53GHz.
The fastest pair, dubbed the Prime cores, share 12MB of L2 cache, while the other six Performance cores share their own 12MB as well. All of that portable CPU horsepower is built on TSMC’s 3nm process and is tied to 5.3GT/sec LPDDR5x memory. Qualcomm says that the combination of its latest CPU architecture, advanced process technology, and fast memory elevates the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s performance and efficiency by 45% each, and as a result lowers total power consumption to the tune of 27%. That translates to additional battery power for games, web browsing, and other smartphone-specific tasks, with smoother more responsive performance.
These benchmarks below are provided by Qualcomm, but should give a peek at performance. As always it’s important to temper excitement until we see retail devices running these chips. That shouldn’t be too long off, but for now, let’s see what we should expect from the latest Snapdragon chip in terms of CPU performance:
In addition to having a higher Geekbench 6 multi-threaded score than any smartphone we’ve ever tested, single-threaded performance is also right on par with Apple’s latest, something that we haven’t been able to say about a Snapdragon chip in a long time.
