Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite as world’s fastest mobile CPU

Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 8 Elite, which it claimed is the world’s fastest mobile centralized processing unit (CPU).

The CPU features Qualcomm’s second-generation custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which the company said will power new era of on-device generative AI. It’s built to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI seamlessly while prioritizing privacy. This means you’ll soon see amazing Unreal Engine 5 visuals in your mobile games.

Speaking at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week, Qualcomm said leading manufacturers and smartphone brands including Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and more, are poised to launch devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, in the coming weeks.

Cisco Cheng, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, said in a press briefing that the new system-on-chip product is slated for mobile devices coming later this year where the priority is to balance efficiency and performance.

Cheng said that the Hexagon NPU has 12 times the performance of the previous generation. The Oryon CPU has three times the performance. And the Adreno GPU has three times the performance.

Overall, the device has more than 40 components embedded in a system-on-chip design, where customers can mix and match the features they want in their final designs.

Cheng also said the Oryon’s Prime core is a brand new microarchitecture that is 46% more efficient than the prior version. It runs at 4.32GHz.

“This ground-up approach and our well-established understanding of mobile experiences allow us to optimize every aspect of the CPU and all that it is attached to it,” Cheng said.

It also fetches data faster than in the past, allowing the core to execute the next instruction faster. Along side two Prime cores are six performance cores. Over the years, Qualcomm has reduced its number of “efficiency” cores and it has now replaced them altogether with the performance cores. The performance cores offer a balance of performance and efficiency, reaching higher speeds of 3.53GHz. It has a 24MB cache.

Qualcomm has also optimized for in-app experiences, multitasking, generative AI, video rendering and streaming, as well as gaming.

“No other use case will benefit more than gaming,” he said.

It will provide smoother gameplay with higher framerates and extend gaming time as much as 2.5 hours with 40% better battery efficiency and 40% better GPU performance. It supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, running the game physics simulations on device in real time.

There can be as many as 9,000 objects on screen at once. The chip can store 12 megabytes of data directly on GPU. The result is longer sustained gameplay sessions, as well as better ray-tracing benchmark performance.

The Snapdragon mobile team has been working with Feral Interactive on the Grid Legends mobile racing game. It will launch exclusively with Qualcomm Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 for Snapdragon 8 Elite users.

And for the first time ever, Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite solution will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It enables a massive increase in film-quality environments in mobile games.

This platform debuts industry technologies such as the latest Qualcomm Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all of which deliver game changing performance improvements.

These new components 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.

Gen AI applications that have emerged in the past two years will run on Snapdragon 8 Elite. It is integrating multimodal gen AI applications and delivering these experiences directly on device, swiftly and with ultra-low latency.

Cheng said the new Qualcomm AI Engine will tap the Oryon CPU for latency-critical AI tasks. The Hexagon NPU has higher throughput across accelerators for faster inferencing performance. It lets AI and computer vision workloads to coexist in the memory. AI assistant experiences can run entirely on the device.

AI assistants running on your smartphone can also be tailored to you, running on the device itself to ensure privacy, Cheng said. AI expansion will expand a photo beyond your device’s borders, AI super resolution boosts clarity, and AI segmentations enhances and identifies individual objects in each scene.

The AI ISP (image signal processing) works with the Hexagon NPU for tasks like auto white balance. The ISP used to process an image and pass it to the NPU. Now the NPU can access the native raw sensor data and implement real-time AI enhancements at 4K and 60 frames per second. This results in more accurate results and flexibility for device makers to implement their own algorithms at any stage.

It also brings AI features previously only available on the cloud right into the device.

“We call this Insight AI” to elevate photography to new heights, Cheng said. You can capture natural skintones in the toughest lighting conditions, like when you’re heavily backlit, Cheng said. You can eliminate objects in a video using an “eraser” feature. You highlight the object and you can erase it without ever having to send video to the cloud.

It has a second-generation 5G AI processor, as well as AI-enhanced WiFi 7, for better connectivity at lower power consumption.

“We are so excited to bring the power of Qualcomm Oryon to our Snapdragon mobile platforms for the first time. Earlier this year we debuted it in PCs, delivering remarkable experiences and unparallel battery life to PC users, energizing the industry and getting the attention of consumers,” said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm, in a statement. “Today, our second generation of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship mobile platform – it’s a major leap forward and we expect consumers to be thrilled with the new experiences enabled by our CPU technology.”

He added, “With leading CPU, GPU and NPU capabilities, the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers dramatic performance enhancements and power efficiency. In addition, it revolutionizes mobile experiences by offering personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device enabling the understanding of speech, context, and images to enhance everything from productivity to creativity tasks while prioritizing user privacy.”