Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite is its next premium mobile chip
After making a huge splash in laptops, Qualcomm is bringing its latest CPU to phones.
Another year, another flagship Qualcomm mobile chip. But things are reportedly a bit different with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company's newest offering headed to premium smartphones (originally leaked by Videocardz). For one, it's using the Oryon CPU that debuted in X Elite chips for laptops last year. It's also using a new 3nm process node, instead of last year's 4nm node. That helps the Snapdragon 8 Elite deliver 45 percent faster single and multi-core performance while using 27 percent less power than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
As expected, the company is doubling down on its generative AI capabilities, with a 45 percent faster NPU (neural processing unit) than before, and gaming performance will also see a 40 percent boost. The 8 Elite will reach a maximum speed of 4.32 GHz across two cores, and it'll hit up to 3.53 GHz in six smaller cores.
Given how impressed we were by the Snapdragon X Elite in the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ PCs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see the Oryon CPU working out well on smartphones. According to Smartprix and Onleaks, early benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite show it scoring 3,025,991 in Antutu, compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's best of around 2.1 million.
