After much rumours and leaks, Qualcomm finally announced their newest flagship mobile chip, Snapdragon 8 Elite (SD 8 Elite), designed for flagship Android devices.
The new chip features an Oryon CPU with a bespoke eight-core configuration, including 2x prime cores at 4.32 GHz and 6x performance cores at up to 3.53 GHz. It boasts a leading 24MB L2 cache and supports 5,300MHz LPDDR5X RAM.
Fabricated using TSMC’s 3nm process, the chip offers a 45% increase in CPU performance and a 44% enhancement in power efficiency compared to the 8 Gen 3.
Qualcomm introduces its updated Adreno GPU, delivering a 40% rise in performance and energy savings, along with better ray-tracing capabilities.
The chip is also the first mobile SoC to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system.
On the AI front, the new Hexagon NPU accelerates AI tasks by 45% and enhances performance per watt. Qualcomm’s AI Engine includes multimodal Gen AI support, capable of running large and small multimodal models with up to 70 tokens on SLMs.
The SD 8 Elite also improves image signal processing (ISP), more closely integrated with the Hexagon NPU, enhancing HDR, skin tones, sky colors, and autofocus. It introduces chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation and a video object eraser feature.
For connectivity, the SD 8 Elite includes the Snapdragon X80 5G modem—the first with 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-assisted mmWave range extension—boasting peak download speeds of 10 Gbps and a theoretical maximum upload speed of 3.5 Gbps.
This modem is coupled with the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, the first to merge Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Ultra Wideband in a single 6nm chip.
The SD 8 Elite is poised to power the next generation of Android flagship smartphones from brands like Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi, and others.
Realme set to launch the first SD 8 Elite phone in Malaysia
Realme just announced on their Facebook that they will be launching the GT 7 Pro on November 2024, and it will be the first smartphone to use the mobile chip in Malaysia.
