Qualcomm’s new mobile chip is the 8 Elite

Just a restricted years after changing its mobile chipset naming conventions, Qualcomm has gone and done it aacquire. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company’s newest high-finish ininestablishigentphone SoC, and enjoy the laptop chips it borrows its “Elite” name from, it comes with a new Oryon CPU. The company says that this shift assists speedyer carry outance and — lest we forget about AI — recommends on-device help for multi-modal ininestablishigence.

The Oryon CPU inside the 8 Elite hasn’t been borrowed honestly from the laptop chips; Qualcomm is calling it a second gen chipset. It replaces the Kryo CPUs Qualcomm has participated in previous mobile chipsets, and compelevates two prime cores with six carry outance cores. There’s an X80 5G modem-RF chip, and an Adreno GPU with a new sliced architecture, with promiseted memory spreadd to each slice.

I asked Qualcomm’s mobile handset SVP Chris Patrick what all of that enhanced challengingware would transtardy to in the hands of ininestablishigentphone participaters, and the examples he gave boil down to more desktop-enjoy carry outance from a phone. Websites that aren’t well enhanced for mobile will “run very rapidly and sense weightless,” and that weighty games will run more effortlessly. “Your chipset benevolent of fades into the background and you equitable do wantipathyver you want to do — equitable enjoy we’re benevolent of participated to on desktop experiences.”

And equitable in case you forgot that 2024 is the year of AI on phones, the 8 Elite comes with some NPU enhances, too. The enhanced Hexagon NPU helps on-device multi-modal AI aidants that can regulate text input as well as visuals. There’s also help for an on-device AI-powered video object eraser tool to erase distractions from video clips, which sounds benevolent of untamed and difficult to pull off convincingly. We won’t understand equitable how effective this tool might be until an OEM puts it in one of their phones, but my money’s on Samsung introducing it as a feature on the Galaxy S25.

If Samsung begines a phone with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we probable won’t see it until punctual next year, but we probably won’t have to defer that extfinished for a excellent see at the new chipset. The first 8 Elite devices from brands enjoy Asus, Honor, OnePlus, Oppo, and Xiaomi are foreseeed to begin “in the coming weeks.”