Next year’s best Android phones should have even better AI capabilities, low-light camera performance, and last longer when playing games. At the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the next generation of chips that will power the best phones from Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus and more manufacturers.
The new chip will enable even more generative AI capabilities, which became the showcase feature that tech companies sought to integrate into their products this year. The smartphone industry has had its own competitive race towards generative AI, starting with the Galaxy AI-equipped Samsung Galaxy S24 in January, while the iPhone 16 series will get parts of Apple Intelligence in a future update. While Qualcomm’s next chip is emerging with only a few notable features so far, it aims to support more features that will give users even more reason to buy Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phones.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite builds on the foundation laid by Qualcomm’s previous chip, last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the company’s first chip capable of generative AI capabilities. The new chip includes even more AI expertise, such as support for an AI assistant to use the camera to recognize objects in real time, and a new trick that generates lighting so that your artificially well-lit face shows up in videos with bright backgrounds. That’s in addition to features available on the previous generation chip, such as generating images via Stable Diffusion and expanding photos beyond their original boundaries.
The chip has an improved neural processing unit, with more cores, resulting in what Qualcomm claims is up to 45% faster AI performance and better energy efficiency. The NPU now integrates multimodal generative AI applications on the device, meaning it can process input from multiple sensors and data sources (audio, video, personal information and more) to answer questions.
The 8 Elite can support more than 70 tokens per second, a measure of how much input (text, photos and so on) can be considered when answering questions.
While the previous three years of Qualcomm’s top chips were Snapdragon Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3, the Snapdragon 8 Elite breaks its naming convention to signal that it’s the best of the best, Qualcomm says. That’s because the 8 Elite is the company’s first mobile chips to use the new Qualcomm-designed Oryon CPU. The company introduced its Snapdragon X Elite PC chips a year ago, which were the first to package Oryon CPUs.
The 8 Elite uses a second-generation Oryon CPU with a 3-nanometer process (smaller than the 4nm of last year’s Kryo CPU), which enables the chip’s 45% greater efficiency. Upgrades to the chip architecture have led to 45% better overall performance, but the more interesting benefit is a 62% improvement in web browsing performance – meaning consumers should see websites and web-based apps load faster.
“I think we’ve all experienced that, even if your phone is great, a website slows down and becomes sluggish. So [the Oryon CPU] is going to provide one [browsing] experience that rivals any desktop,” Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s senior vice president and general manager of the mobile phone division, said in a briefing.
This not only ensures that websites load faster. Many modern apps and software rely on web browsing, so having a CPU designed to speed that up will lead to improvements in the services consumers use every day.
That improved efficiency applies to high-intensity activities like gaming, and Qualcomm says the new chip will enable up to 2.5 hours of additional playtime.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite also improves camera performance, mainly through a new ISP with better AI touches on autofocus, white balance and exposure, all of which happens behind the scenes and should result in better photos. The NPU now also has direct access to the camera sensors themselves for real-time improvements, including for video. Phone makers can plug their camera algorithms directly into this pipeline.
The 8 Elite also has a range of connectivity improvements, mainly thanks to – you guessed it – AI. The X80 5G modem uses AI on multi-antenna management to better combine signals for clearer connections, while the FastConnect 7900 integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to reduce latency. This allows calls that leave Bluetooth range to transfer the connection to Wi-Fi to keep the conversation going.
We’ll have to wait until new phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite actually launch to see how much of a difference the new chip makes. But based on Qualcomm’s claims, it looks like the chip should bring a mix of general and AI-powered upgrades to the next generation of Android phones.
