Qualcomm Inc. has just announced its newest flagship smartphone chipset with what it says is the fastest mobile central processing unit ever seen on a mobile device.

The company unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii today, saying it’s the successor to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It’s expected to feature in a number of upcoming, high-end Android smartphones from the likes of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Vivo Mobile Communication Co. Ltd. in the coming weeks.

The Snapdragon Elite 8 is the company’s first chipset to feature the second-generation Oryon CPU, which was originally designed for laptops but has now been optimized for mobile devices, the company explained.

It’s also the first to carry the “Elite” tag, which will henceforth be used to designate the company’s most powerful chipsets.

According to Qualcomm, the second-generation Oryon CPU has been designed to handle the “complexities of multimodal AI” better than any smartphone chipset yet. So we can expect to see lots of interesting artificial intelligence capabilities appearing in the next generation of Android phones.

Getting into the technicalities, Qualcomm said the Snapdragon Elite 8 features two Prime cores clocked at 4.32 gigahertz and six Performance cores rated at 3.53 gigahertz, with both sets being “custom-designed.” Each cluster boasts a total of 12 megabytes of L2 cache, meaning a combined 24 megabytes that will enable “insanely fast” data retrieval, the company promised.

Notably, the Snapdragon Elite 8 is the first Qualcomm chipset in a while that doesn’t feature any Efficiency cores. It’s based on an entirely new architectural design that revolves around an “Instant Wake” feature that’s designed to reduce frequent power cycling of individual cores.

Onstage, a Qualcomm executive explained that a typical power-up sequence on its older chipsets involves using a reset code to prepare the core for operation. But with the Snapdragon Elite 8, the company says it has eliminated that sequence, using hardware that allows the core to execute the next instruction immediately. Qualcomm reckons that this helps the Snapdragon Elite 8 to deliver a 45% improvement in single- and multi-core performance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.

In addition, the chipset packs an Adreno graphics processing unit based on a new sliced architecture that’s 40% faster than its predecessor GPU, with a 35% boost in ray-tracing performance.

The company also highlighted significant improvements in power efficiency, with the Oryon CPU gaining 40% over the one used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and the GPU delivering a 27% boost. In practical terms, this means around two and half hours of extra battery life, the company said.

Qualcomm also talked about the Snapdragon Elite 8’s AI Engine, which leverages the CPU and GPU alongside a neural processing unit, plus the onboard memory and Sensing Hub feature. It said the Oryon CPU helps to initiate AI workloads and takes care of the heavy lifting, enabling ultra-low latency, while the GPU handles inference.

The company said the new Hexagon NPU is 45% faster than the one found in last year’s chip, and is deeply integrated with an AI ISP, or image signal processor. According to Qualcomm, the AI ISP will enable high-end cameras to capture “vivid” 4K videos at 60 frames per second in “near darkness.”

In addition, Qualcomm said the chipset comes with 24GB of dual-channel LP-DDR5x memory to support generative AI applications. The display support remains unchanged at 4K at 60 hertz, but users can now switch to standard 1080p resolution at 240 hertz if they desire.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said the new chipset shows that Qualcomm continues to push the boundaries in terms of what smartphones are capable of. “The new chip brings together the trifecta of CPU, GPU and NPU, which is key to on-device AI,” he said. “Success will be measured by how many smartphone makers adopt the new chip, and it’s looking good on that front, though still too early to tell for sure.

The analyst said the another notable aspect of today’s announcement is Qualcomm’s push to play a greater part in the software stack that makes it possible to bring AI to its SoCs. “Qualcomm is playing up here, expanding into platform software, and the next year will tell us if that push is succeeding or not,” he added.

For anyone planning to invest in a new, high-end Android smartphone this year, they can expect much faster application launches, more efficient multitasking and more advanced onboard AI functionality than they’ve ever seen on a mobile device.

Qualcomm said we can expect to see the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset feature in upcoming smartphones from Samsung, Vivo, Asustek Computer Inc., Honor Device Co Ltd., OnePlus USA Corp., Oppo, iQOO Communication Technology Co., Realme Mobile Telecommunications Co. Ltd. and Xiaomi Corp. in the coming weeks.

Photos: Qualcomm