Qualcomm’s 2025 flagship chipset for Android smartphones is the Snapdragon 8 Elite

Note: This feature was first published on 22 October 2024.

Qualcomm has finally introduced its 2025 flagship mobile platform designed for Android smartphones and other mobile devices, and it's none other than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite.

The sudden name change (after years of Gen 1, Gen 2, and Gen 3) hints at a crucial difference in the chipset’s key component. According to Qualcomm, Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first Qualcomm mobile chipset platform to use its 64-bit Qualcomm Oryon CPU.

This means that the 64-bit Kyro CPU, which first appeared in the Snapdragon 820 during its 2015 announcement, will finally entrust its flagship-delivering legacy to Qualcomm’s in-house chip design, letting Qualcomm’s own CPU carry the torches forward.

Also notable is that the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s CPU is the second-generation version. The first-generation Oryon CPU first appeared last year inside its Snapdragon X Elite PC platforms, which are designed for laptops and notebooks.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, the sum of all parts

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite otherwise follows its intended design and use. It’s an all-in-one mobile platform that combines 40+ processing units and components to handle graphics, AI, imaging, connectivity, and other core needs of phone users who need flagship-tier performance.

CPU and everyday performance

Qualcomm said the Oryon CPU features two 4.32GHz prime cores and six 3.53GHz performance cores, with no “efficiency cores”. This choice was made because the new cores are so efficient at power consumption that there’s no need to insert cores for low-power tasks. Accompanying both clusters is 12MB L2 cache each, totalling 24MB cache and an increase to 5.3GHz LPDDR5x L1 memory. Together, Qualcomm said the CPU is up to 46% more efficient at power usage than before.

Graphics and gaming

For graphics processing and gaming, Qualcomm said the Adreno GPU adopts sliced architecture for the first time, so users can expect up to 40% better power efficiency, 40% improved GPU performance, and up to 50% CPU performance uplift as the unit takes on more graphical processing tasks, thanks to better-optimised coding and engines.

Support for Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system has been newly added, allowing mobile app game developers to simply adopt Chaos Physics for their game’s real-time physics rendering (the efficiency offered helps uplift CPU performance).

An improved ray-tracing position fetch algorithm also helps improve memory read bandwidth by up to 40%, making ray-tracing even more efficient inside games.

Qualcomm is working with Feral Interactive, a games partner, on the arcade racing title Grid Legends. This title will showcase Qualcomm’s Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 in Snapdragon 8 Elite phones.   

Unreal Engine’s Nanite virtualised geometry solution is supported on the Snapdragon platform for the first time, making “film-quality” 3D environments more possible in mobile gaming.

Generative AI

To move things along within the artificial intelligence space, Qualcomm added on-device multimodal generative AI support. This means that generative AI on Snapdragon 8 Elite is no longer limited to single interaction, single format input and output. You can combine various forms of input (voice/audio, text, images and photos, videos, documents) to achieve various outcomes. Being on-device also helps with Qualcomm’s claims of heightened user privacy.

The upgrades to the Qualcomm AI Engine (which taps into the abovementioned upgraded CPU and GPU) also saw an improved Qualcomm Hexagon NPU that has added more cores to its scaler and vector accelerators to increase its throughput. Qualcomm claimed that the new processor is up to 45% faster at AI performance, with just as much improvements in performance per watt.

Concurrency has also enhanced its AI computing ability, especially in computer vision workloads. It allows AI computing to work in tandem to save time and better use its processing resources.

The Qualcomm AI Engine contains new multimodal AI models, which removes the need for speech-to-text processing, on top of larger token capacity for these AI models (the latter means you can upload larger files for AI reasoning). 

This extends to the devices’ cameras since the AI Engine can also reason and infer from live camera data fed from its imaging pipeline, improving photos-based visual data.

For AI Assistants by phone brands, Qualcomm also improved its Qualcomm Sensing Hub to make it 60% “more powerful” with 34% more memory, making it better at fetching personal data and providing personalised on-device solutions and results.

Image processing and camera performance

Snapdragon 8 Elite gets a new imaging signal processing unit (ISP) called AI ISP, which replaces Cognitive ISP while keeping the same number of units (three). More of the processing pipeline now sits in the raw domain, making adding image enhancements more accurate and flexible. 

To market how Qualcomm created even more direct channels between its AI ISPs and Hexagon NPU, Qualcomm overhauled its Hexagon Direct Link so that it accesses 40K60FPS raw sensor data instead of waiting for the ISP to process it first and post-process it later.

The additional closeness to its Hexagon NPU means getting AI enhancements to AutoFocus, Auto Exposure, and Auto White Balance. So, even before phone brands add their imaging flavours, the imaging quality is now even higher than before, and they can also park their image-tuning algorithms on the NPU.

The increased access also means cloud-based generative AI photo-editing is now possible on-device. Qualcomm calls this Insight AI, a collection of on-device AI algorithms specifically for imaging needs. Examples of its features include limitless segmentation (it supports more than 250 layers of masks for AI to make edits), real-time Skin and Sky algorithm (does what it says on the label), and real-time re-lighting that mitigates bad backlit video calls.

Other improvements include a 35% increase in zero shutter lag throughput and greater pixel throughput at 4.3GP/s. This means the chipset can support up to three 48MP sensors at 30FPS simultaneously.

5G and Wi-Fi 7

The Qualcomm X80 5G Modem-RF System, first introduced during MWC 2024, powers Snapdragon 8 Elite’s connectivity. Click here to read more about the modem transmitter.

For Wi-Fi 7 compatibility, it uses the AI-powered FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, which was also launched during MWC 2024. You can read about it in its standalone article here. In short, this component also grants the Snapdragon 8 Elite Bluetooth 6.0 and ultra-wideband (UWB) support. It’s 40% more power efficient than its predecessor.

Availability of Snapdragon 8 Elite

Qualcomm said that its customers (phone brands) will launch handsets with Snapdragon 8 Elite “in the coming weeks”. 

While the exact phone models aren’t specified, the list of customers includes ASUS, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, “and more”. As the Snapdragon 8 Elite is designated for premium, flagship-tier devices, we can expect these brands to carry it in their best phone models.

Qualcomm also announced that its customers will receive eight years of Android and software support for the Snapdragon 8 Elite. 

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