Throughout day considered one of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, it unveiled its newest flagship SoC, dubbed the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This marks a pivotal swing into harnessing the technical prowess of its acquired Nuvia group.
The brand new chip is powered by Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon cores and strikes away from its reliance on Arm’s off-the-shelf Cortex cores to drive its flagship cell SoC. The chipmaker, nonetheless, hasn’t strayed too far, because the Oryon cores are nonetheless primarily based on Arm’s v8.7-A ISA, however it’s definitely a step away from earlier generations, as Qualcomm is aiming to do issues by itself phrases.
Featured within the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the brand new Oryon cores change the Kryo cores that Qualcomm has lengthy relied on. The outfit claims this new Elite SoC delivers a 44 p.c enchancment in energy effectivity over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, although as at all times with these numbers, it is value ready till real-world benchmarks are available in earlier than taking that as gospel.
For manufacturing, Qualcomm is utilizing TSMC’s 3nm N3E node, which is definitely the identical course of utilized by rivals together with Apple for its A18 chips and MediaTek with its Dimensity 9400.
The Snapdragon maker has additionally gone a distinct route on the design too, because it has determined to ditch the acquainted mixture of prime, efficiency, and effectivity cores and has opted to eradicate smaller cores altogether. The Snapdragon 8 Elite has two prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and 6 efficiency cores at 3.53 GHz.
It would not be a brand new chip with out AI being crammed in, and Qualcomm has certainly embedded the Snapdragon 8 Elite with its Hexagon NPU. The chip maker claims it’s 60 p.c higher when it comes to “AI efficiency” than the earlier era, however that is still to be seen in actual world functions.
Graphics have additionally uplifted during the last era with the newest Adreno 750 GPU. Qualcomm has thrown in hardware-accelerated ray tracing and help for 144 Hz at 4K, and it does declare a marked 25 p.c enchancment over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, however as typical, these figures are simply advertising and marketing till the benchmarks show in any other case.
Being restricted to 4K 60fps in recording is a slight caveat, because the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 is providing 8K 60fps. Relating picture high quality, the chip big’s Spectra ISP has been rebranded because the AI ISP for the Snapdragon 8 Elite, growing throughput to 4.3 gigapixels per second from 3.2 gigapixels. It additionally helps configurations like 48MP + 48MP + 48MP multi-sensor and 108MP single digicam at 30FPS. Qualcomm has bumped up the nonetheless picture help to 320MP, in comparison with 200MP within the earlier Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Different options of the Snapdragon 8 Elite embody Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless expertise, which is claimed to ship as much as 24-bit 48 kHz Bluetooth audio streaming and 96kHz over Wi-Fi. It additionally has its fabled XPAN expertise for wide-range audio protection by way of low-power Wi-Fi 7. On the connectivity facet, the Snapdragon X80 5G modem helps multi-gigabit speeds with 4×6 MIMO, whereas FastConnect 7900 system integrates Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and UWB proximity that permits options comparable to object monitoring and constructing entry management.
Leo Gebbie, principal analyst and director at CCS Perception, acknowledged how the Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm’s strongest chipset launch but and is pushing AI to the forefront of its platforms. “The Snapdragon 8 Elite offers the idea to speed up the introduction of AI options into third-party apps and built-in multi-modal assistants,” he famous.
Gebbie additionally emphasised the backing from key machine makers like Honor, Samsung, and Xiaomi, which implies Qualcomm is ready to take care of its presence within the premium Android section. “Early backing from machine makers together with Honor, Samsung and Xiaomi is a powerful begin for Qualcomm because it seems to proceed its dominance on the premium finish of the Android smartphone market.”
A couple of units have already been introduced which can be set to place the Snapdragon 8 Elite into the palms of customers, together with the Xiaomi 15 collection, OnePlus 13, iQOO 13, and the Honor Magic 7. These are anticipated to begin plodding onto cabinets someday in October. It is probably we’ll see extra manufacturers comparable to Vivo and Oppo include much more Snapdragon 8 Elite units, however the proof in all of the pudding would be the real-world efficiency and the way it stacks up towards Apple and MediaTek’s product units. ®
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