Qualcomm’s latest flagship mobile chip – the Snapdragon 8 Elite – is now official. Featuring custom second-generation Oryon CPU cores with up to a 4.32 GHz clock speed, it is currently the most capable mobile chip. This time around, Qualcomm is calling it Elite, as it is “showcasing the remarkable progress it represents for the industry.”

With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm is introducing several industry-first features and technologies, including on-device multi-modal AI capability, and improved CPU and GPU performance. Here are all the details regarding the specifications and capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Elite system-on-a-chip. The latest Snapdragon 8 Elite is fabricated by TSMC using its cutting-edge 3nm process, the same as the Apple A18 Pro chip that powers the iPhone 16 Pro.

Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU and GPU Simplified

Snapdragon 8 Elite consists of an octa-core central processing unit (CPU) with a hybrid architecture, consisting of two prime cores with a peak clock speed of up to 4.32 GHz, the highest on any mobile chip, accompanied by six performance cores at 3.53 GHz. Unlike the previous generation Qualcomm mobile chip – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which made use of ARM’s custom Cortex cores – all six CPU cores on the Snapdragon 8 Elite are designed using Qualcomm’s custom second-generation Oryon CPU architecture.

These CPU cores now have access to over 24 MB of L2 cache, again, the highest in the industry (for a mobile chip), paired with up to 24 GB of LPDDR5x RAM. The new CPU cores ensure that the Snapdragon 8 Elite can deliver 50 per cent improved performance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is an excellent leap in performance, especially when compared to the previous chip, which is already plenty fast.

The new three-core Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) with a 1.1 GHz clock speed is also 40 per cent faster with 40 per cent power savings, offering 35 per cent improved ray-tracing performance when compared to the Adreno 740 on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This is also the first mobile GPU to support Unreal Engine 5 Nanite, further enhancing gaming compatibility and capability.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Enables On-Device AI Experience

Most smartphones currently offer an edge-powered AI experience at best, where part of the processing happens on the device and part on the cloud. The new and improved Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) is up to 45 per cent faster and delivers 45 per cent better performance per watt.

The new NPU includes an 8-core scalar accelerator, and a 6-core vector accelerator with support for LLM (large language model) and classic AI acceleration, where an AI app designed to run on an on-device model can even process voice input and generate text, image, and audio output. This will result in enabling some on-device AI applications like AI Expansion, AI super-resolution, and AI segmentation, which can enable improved camera performance and image-editing capabilities.

The new AI-powered Cognitive Image Sensing Processor (ISP) can now process up to 4.3GP/s throughput, support up to 320 MP native resolution, and also record up to 8K videos at 60fps.

Flagship Networking Experiences

Qualcomm networking chips are well-known in the industry, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite packs the flagship X80 5G modem along with FastConnect 7900, enabling improved 5G performance and Wi-Fi 7 capabilities.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Benchmarks

Snapdragon 8 Elite showcases stellar performance in benchmarks, scoring 3221 and 10236 on Geekbench single-core and multi-core CPU tests, respectively. While the single-core score is slightly lower than that of the A18 Pro, the Snapdragon 8 Elite offers a better multi-core score, as it has eight CPU cores, whereas Apple’s A18 Pro has just six.

However, on AnTuTu, the Snapdragon 8 Elite scores 3,014,075 points, while the score from the A18 Pro is around 1,700,000, which is much lower than the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which offers better GPU, memory, and UX performance.