The first phone with Qualcomm’s new chip will be Xiaomi’s next flagship device.
On stage at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, the chipmaker introduced its newest silicon for premium phones, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Soon after, Xiaomi took the stage to declare that the first device to use this chip would be its own flagship Xiaomi 15, which is coming by the end of October.
Xiaomi senior vice president Adam Zeng made the announcement, detailing the first performance advantages the Snapdragon 8 Elite will bring to phones. The Xiaomi 15 series has a 29.7% decrease in power consumption and runs 3 degrees Celsius cooler at peak temperatures. Given Qualcomm’s emphasis on battery efficiency in the new Snapdragon 8 Elite, this is the first real-world example of how the chip improves phones.
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Xiaomi did the same thing at last year’s Snapdragon Summit when it revealed the Xiaomi 14 would be the first phone to run last year’s leading Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. It was the Xiaomi 14 Ultra released back in April that impressed me with its fast speeds, great cameras and AI features.
Qualcomm says its Snapdragon 8 Elite offers many advancements thanks to its Oryon CPU, which debuted in the company’s PC chips last year. On mobile, this promises higher performance as well as greater efficiency, especially when performing intensive tasks. For example, phones using the chip can game for 2.5 hours longer, Qualcomm says. The new chip also offers more generative AI features.
More phones will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite, including the Asus ROG Phone 9 which is set to launch in November, but the Xiaomi 15 will be the first across the finish line to show what the chip is capable of. We’ll have to wait and see how (and if) it harnesses the additional generative AI and camera capabilities debuting in the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
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The Snapdragon 8 Elite is built to lengthen battery life and boost performance on upcoming premium Android phones.
The new chip will enable even more generative AI capabilities, which became the showcase feature that tech companies scrambled to integrate into their products this year. The smartphone industry had its own competitive race toward generative AI starting with the Galaxy AI-equipped Samsung Galaxy S24 in January, while the iPhone 16 series is set to get parts of Apple Intelligence in a future update. While nascent with only a few standout features thus far, Qualcomm’s next chip aims to support more features that will give users even more reason to buy Snapdragon 8 Elite-equipped phones.
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The Snapdragon 8 Elite builds on the foundation laid by Qualcomm’s previous chip, last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which was 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 that were available on the previous-generation chip, like image generation through 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 power efficiency. The NPU now integrates multimodal generative AI applications on the device, meaning it can handle inputs from multiple sensors and data sources (audio, video, personal info and more) to answer queries.
The 8 Elite can support more than 70 tokens per second, a metric for how many inputs (text, photos and so on) can be considered when answering queries.
While the previous three years of Qualcomm top-tier chips were Snapdragon Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3, the Snapdragon 8 Elite breaks from its naming convention to signify it’s the best of the best, Qualcomm says. That’s because the 8 Elite is the first of the company’s mobile chips to use the new Qualcomm-designed Oryon CPU. To wit, the company introduced its Snapdragon X Elite PC chips a year ago, which were the first to pack 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 helps enable the chip’s 45% greater efficiency. Upgrades in 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 one time or another that a website, even though your phone is great, slows down and is labored. So [the Oryon CPU] is going to provide a [browsing] experience that rivals any kind of desktop,” Chris Patrick, a Qualcomm senior vice president and general manager of the mobile handset division, said in a briefing.
This won’t just make it faster to load websites. Many modern apps and software rely on web browsing, so having a CPU designed to speed that up will have knock-on improvements to services consumers use every day.
That improved efficiency applies to high-intensity activities like gaming, and Qualcomm says its new chip enables 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 can also now directly access the camera sensors themselves for real-time enhancements, including for video. Phonemakers can plug their camera algorithms directly into this pipeline.
The 8 Elite also has a round of connectivity improvements mainly due to — you guessed it — AI. The X80 5G Modem uses AI on multiantenna management to better juggle signals for clearer connections, while the FastConnect 7900 integrates Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to reduce latency. This makes it possible for calls leaving Bluetooth range to hand off the connection to Wi-Fi to keep the call 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 sounds like the chip should bring a mix of general and AI-fueled upgrades to the next generation of Android phones.