Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite with world’s fastest mobile CPU

Snapdragon 8 Elite performance overview. (Image credit: Qualcomm)

“With leading CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphics processing unit), and NPU (neural processing unit) capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency. In addition, it revolutionises mobile experiences by offering personalised, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device, enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritising user privacy,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Qualcomm calls the Snapdragon 8 Elite “the most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever,” which includes custom CPU cores based on second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU architecture, a new Adreno GPU, and an enhanced Hexagon NPU, fabricated using TSMC’s 3nm process.

The processor is also capable of delivering on-device multi-modal generative AI experiences. With an AnTuTu score of over three million, the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip tops the popular smartphone benchmark tool.

This is also the first mobile chip with a peak CPU clock speed of 4.32 GHz, enabling over 45 per cent improved performance with over 44 per cent improvement in power efficiency.

The new Hexagon NPU supports on-device large language models (LLMs), large multimodal models (LMMs), and large vision models (LVMs), enabling on-device text, image, and audio generation. The same also goes for the Adreno GPU, which offers a 40 per cent improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with over 40 per cent greater power efficiency.

The chip also consists of the Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System for improved networking capabilities along with the FastConnect 7900, enabling features like Wi-Fi 7.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite can support up to 320 MP cameras and can record up to 8K resolution videos at up to 60fps in HDR and 1080p super slow motion videos at 480fps. The chip supports up to 24 GB of LPDDR5x RAM in dual-channel memory, and it also supports the UFS 4.0 storage standard.