• At its 2024 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm revealed its latest flagship mobile processor – the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
• It is built on the company’s new Oryon CPU and designed to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI.
• Several smartphone makers already have access to it, with the likes of HONOR, Samsung, vivo, OPPO, Xiaomi, and more set to reveal new devices with the latest processor.

Qualcomm is hosting its annual Snapdragon Summit this week, and just as in previous years, the silicon maker has a new flagship mobile processor to showcase in the form of the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Taking a page out of Apple’s playbook, Qualcomm is calling it “the most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever.”

“This platform debuts industry leading technologies such as the second generation custom-built Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all of which deliver game changing performance improvements,” it outlined regarding its design.

“These innovations empower the Snapdragon 8 Elite to transform user experiences with their devices – making on-device multi-modal generative AI applications a reality on smartphones powered by Snapdragon. These technologies also fuel many other experiences across camera capabilities, with our most powerful AI-ISP, as well as next level gaming, super-fast web browsing and more,” it added in a blog post.

In terms of the actual numbers to back up the “most powerful” tag, Qualcomm pointed out that the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers peak performance of 5.3GHz for gen AI-related work on-device, along with the 3nm architecture yielding a 33 percent improvement in image optimisation.

Added to this is better power efficiency, reported as a 44 percent and 40 percent improvement on the CPU and GPU respectively. Gaming too has received a boost, with it overall enhancing by 40 percent, while ray tracing being 35 percent better, according to Qualcomm.

Also worth mentioning is that WiFI 7 and 5G Advanced are supported thanks to the new chipset.

As for when you’ll see it in an actual smartphone, HONOR has already teased its use in the upcoming Magic7 series, with the likes of ASUS, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, vivo, and Xiaomi set to debut new phones sporting the flagship processor.

With Snapdragon having made strides with its Copilot+ CPUs this year, it looks to be cementing its position when it comes to Android flagship phones too.