The next big mobile phone chip from Qualcomm will be the Elite. According to the chip industry, the upcoming mobile phone chip focusing on the Android system is not just a step forward from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 last year. At the big Snapdragon summit in Maui, Qualcomm announced that the Snapdragon 8 Elite with Oryon-based CPU alongside the next generation of Adreno GPU must be more powerful than any other current mobile chip, and it does this through better power optimization.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite uses the internal Oryon CPU cores – now making its way to mobile phones after first appearing with Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus – alongside the next step in Adreno 830 GPU to track battery life on a TSMC 3nm processor. Of course, this is the age of on-device AI, so Qualcomm also claims that the next step in Hexagon NPU must be 45% faster to support “multimedia AI”. The real star of the show is the CPU, which features six cores and four performance cores that can reach clock speeds up to 4.32GHz.
Qualcomm has released a lot of benchmarks for its new chip, but of course, you shouldn’t take them at face value. It’s enough to say that Qualcomm claims it can outperform the iPhone 16 Pro with the A18 Pro chip in multi-core settings. The Snapdragon 8 Elite has 24MB of L2 cache, with 12MB dedicated to the four performance cores. The new chip set is supposed to offer 44% better power efficiency compared to the previous generation.
Adreno has three chips running at 1.10GHz clock speeds. Qualcomm says the chip should support resolutions up to QHD+ at 240Hz refresh rates. This version of Adreno is expected to deliver a 40% performance boost compared to last year’s chip, as well as a 35% increase in performance with ray tracing. It is also the first mobile chip to support Unreal Engine 5.3 Nanite.
All of this sounds impressive. But while it may support big-name games, it doesn’t mean that your phone will be the primary way to play them. We’ll have to wait for the next lineup of gaming phones to showcase the power of the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
As for connectivity, the Snapdragon X Elite features the X80 5G modem and supports wifi 7 on the FastConnect 7900 antenna. The other side of the chip set uses Qualcomm’s Spectra ISP processor for images, claiming to have better low-light photo capabilities and support for image sizes up to 320 megapixels if a phone maker dares to make a sensor that can support this size.
Qualcomm responds to Intel’s Lunar Lake, claiming competitors “chose data”
At the annual Snapdragon summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm came out fighting. The U.S.-based chip manufacturer was affected by Intel’s recent release of Lunar Lake chips for small and thin laptops. The company now claims that Intel misunderstood, as its Snapdragon X Elite chips still outperform in power efficiency and performance, even if only parts of its claims matter to the next consumer choice for laptops.
The Snapdragon chips based on ARM from Qualcomm were supposed to be the revolution needed for lightweight Windows laptops. They promised better performance than traditional x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD along with laughable battery life. To sour the mood, Intel released Lunar Lake for the first time, claiming it could match or surpass Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite chips and still achieve huge battery life gains.
Competition being what it is, Qualcomm was not pleased with Intel’s offering. Sridhar Parthasarathy, Qualcomm’s Senior Engineering Manager, told a group of reporters that Intel “chose” SKU units to compare its new chips against. Parthasarathy complained that Intel compared its main chips with Snapdragon X1E-80-100, not X1E-84.
Among many complaints, Qualcomm claims that the advanced Snapdragon X Elite processor can outperform the Intel Core Ultra 288V on key Cinebench R24 benchmarks and surpass it in multi-core settings. It also claims that the mid-range X1E-80 chip can be 92% faster than the Ultra 7 256V, both of which were tested on this year’s Dell XPS 13.
The thing is, you can’t currently find a laptop with the key Lunar Lake chip, the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V. Most laptop OEMs are announcing either the Core Ultra 7 256V or 258V. I had hands-on time with a Zenbook S 14 with the 256V variant, and I can say the performance was strong, if not necessarily overwhelming. The other big claim was that the X Elite chips are still more power efficient than Intel’s mid-range lineup.
Intel routinely informed reviewers that its direct comparison with Snapdragon X Elite would be against the 258V, a chip Qualcomm failed to use in this recent round of standard comparisons. The only thing Qualcomm needs to continue comparisons with is the Ultra 9 288V, a video clip on YouTube from PCWorld comparing multiple chips. Intel, of course, sticks to its own standards.
All this chip frenzy has become silly. Very few things about advanced chips from each company affect consumers as no one can buy a laptop with them. Qualcomm is right, it is extremely difficult to find a new lightweight laptop featuring the advanced Lunar Lake chips. The same can be said for the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100 version. Most systems you’ll find for sale online will use the X1E-78 instead, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x. The only real place you’ll find the X1E-84 is the Galaxy Book4 Edge, the laptop Qualcomm used for its benchmarks.
We may eventually see a Microsoft Surface laptop with the advanced Lunar Lake chip, but currently, laptop makers seem unsure how to sell an advanced chip. None of this competition matters if consumers can’t use the central processing units (CPU) released by chip makers each year.
