Qualcomm has just announced its next major smartphone chip. The successor to the excellent Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and OnePlus 12 is here, and in many ways, it’s a very big deal.
Talking about smartphone chips isn’t always the most exciting thing, but Qualcomm has given us a lot to talk about and look forward to this time around. Let’s get into it.
Qualcomm’s new chip has a new name
For starters, there’s the name. Widely expected to be called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, Qualcomm’s newest mobile chip is called the Snapdragon 8 Elite. On the one hand, it brings the company’s smartphone chips in line with its Snapdragon X Elite laptop chipsets. On the other, it is confusing going from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 last year to the Snapdragon 8 Elite this year.
It’s a significant name change, and it’s one Qualcomm feels indicates how big of an upgrade this year’s chip is. Speaking with Qualcomm’s SVP and GM of Mobile Chris Patrick, he says “this is a special year” for Snapdragon and that the company sees a clear difference “before this chip and after this chip.”
How much faster is it? A lot
On the note of those upgrades, let’s dig into them. Most smartphone chips have performance cores and efficiency cores. Performance cores handle intensive tasks like gaming and apps, while efficiency cores keep background processes running. For context, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has five performance cores, two efficiency cores, and one prime core (which delivers even more horsepower than performance cores).
The new Snapdragon 8 Elite doesn’t have any efficiency cores. Instead, it has six performance cores and two prime cores. Further, the clock speed of those cores is faster than before. The two prime cores can go up to 4.32GHz — a significant increase from the 3.3GHz maximum speed of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s prime core. Similarly, the performance cores of the Snapdragon 8 Elite are clocked at 3.53GHz — another upgrade from the 3.2GHz maximum of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s performance cores. Qualcomm says this translates to 45% better overall CPU performance while simultaneously delivering a 44% improvement to CPU power efficiency.
Qualcomm shared benchmark test results of the Snapdragon 8 Elite to give an idea of just how much faster this year’s chip really is. Below are Geekbench results from a Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device, compared to our own benchmark results from a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered Galaxy S24 Plus and the A18 chip inside the iPhone 16 Plus.
| Geekbench 6 CPU (Single) | Geekbench 6 CPU (Multi) | |
| Snapdragon 8 Elite | 3222 | 10444 |
| Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 | 2333 | 7129 |
| Apple A18 | 3462 | 8564 |
The single and multi-core scores of the Snapdragon 8 Elite are impressively higher than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Apple’s A18 chip appears to still have the edge in single-core performance, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite tears ahead of it for multi-core performance. We’ll put the Snapdragon 8 Elite through our own tests as soon as we can, but based on what we see so far, it looks like the real deal.
This all-big-core design is something MediaTek first introduced with the Dimensity 9300 chip last year and continued with the Dimensity 9400 earlier this month. It’s very interesting to see Qualcomm also shift to this new design, and the company claims it allows for “speeds never before seen in the smartphone realm.” We’ll certainly need to see for ourselves if that’s true, but at least on paper, it’s an impressive setup.
And that’s just the CPU portion of the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The new Adreno GPU is using a sliced architecture for the first time, which should translate to better performance and power efficiency — 40% gains with both, to be exact. It also enables support for Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite system for the first time on a smartphone chip, which should translate to incredibly high graphic fidelity in games that use it.
A splash of AI, too
As you’d expect from a chip announcement in 2024, there’s also some AI. This year’s big upgrade is Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU, which is now part of the Qualcomm AI Engine. In human terms, that means the Snapdragon 8 Elite is now capable of many more on-device AI features that previously required the cloud.
Qualcomm provides several examples, including running a multimodal AI assistant capable of interpreting text, voice, and photo input entirely on-device. Similar AI advancements come to photography. Qualcomm designed a new ISP (image signal processor) for the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and thanks to a tighter connection to the chip’s AI engine, that translates to new AI enhancements to autofocus, auto white balance, and auto exposure.
It’s interesting stuff, but manufacturers will decide if and how to implement these tools into their phones. There’s no guarantee the Samsung Galaxy S25 will have all of these things, for example, but it might, and that’s still impressive.
A chip worth getting excited about
Smartphone chips usually aren’t exciting things to talk about. But when a chip like the Snapdragon 8 Elite has such significant year-over-year performance and efficiency improvements, that changes.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 proved to be an excellent chip throughout our testing this year. It’s found in many of the best Android phones you can buy in 2024 and is equally capable of fantastic performance and battery life. If the Snapdragon 8 Elite improves those things as much as Qualcomm claims it does, color me impressed.
We expect the first phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite to launch in 2025, and I can’t wait to get my hands on them.
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