What is the Snapdragon 8 Elite? Qualcomm’s flagship chipset explained

Qualcomm has revealed its new flagship smartphone chipset for 2025 dubbed the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Revealed on the first day of Snapdragon Summit 2024, the new top-end processor ditches the old ‘8 Gen X’ branding, instead sharing the same Elite branding as Qualcomm’s impressive Snapdragon X Elite laptop chipset.

It also sports the same Oryon CPU architecture, albeit a newer, more power-efficient version, bringing with it massive gains in processing power, along with a boosted GPU for a more immersive gaming experience on the go. And, with an even smarter NPU, Snapdragon 8 Elite devices can perform some pretty cool AI tricks too.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, including a breakdown of the chipset’s components and new features and the phones it’ll likely appear in. 

What is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite?

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm’s latest flagship mobile chipset. It’s essentially an upgrade to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, though with such a huge jump in CPU performance, Qualcomm decided it was worthy of its ‘Elite’ branding, reserved for its truly top-end products.

And, like the Snapdragon X Elite chipset for laptops, the Snapdragon 8 Elite also makes use of the Oryon CPU architecture. Qualcomm is keen to point out that it isn’t simply using the same CPU as the laptop chipset either; instead, it’s a brand new second-gen microarchitecture that’s up to 46% more efficient than the first-gen variant. 

The chipset’s second-gen Oryon CPU is comprised of two 4.32GHz Prime Cores, the fastest in the mobile space right now, along with six 3.35GHz Performance Cores. 

There aren’t any Efficiency Cores this time around, as Qualcomm has been slowly replacing them with Performance Cores over the past few generations. According to Qualcomm, this delivers the ‘best combination of performance and power’, delivering faster app launches, seamless multitasking and new GenAI capabilities.

It’ll also have a massive impact on gaming when combined with the upgraded Adreno GPU. It’s using a sliced architecture for the first time ever to help it deliver not only higher clock speeds and better performance (the company claims a 40% boost to frame rate in games), but a 40% more efficient experience that means you’ll get to game for longer without reaching for a charger. 

It’ll also support Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite solution to improve 3D environments in games with better textures and improved lighting. It’s also rolling out Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 support, essentially optimising supported titles specifically for the Snapdragon 8 Elite. 

Combined, Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 8 Elite can achieve speeds ‘never before seen in the smartphone realm’. In early benchmark testing released by the company, the chipset clocks scores of 3321 and 10,426 in Geekbench 6’s single- and multi-core tests respectively. 

That’s more powerful than the competing MediaTek Dimensity 9400’s 3058 and 9600, and even beats the 3338 and 8167 of the A18 Pro within the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Snapdragon 8 Elite AI features

Of course, as we’ve seen in recent years, AI capabilities are just as important as pure processing power when it comes to flagship-level smartphone chipsets – and Qualcomm claims there are a bunch of improvements on that front too. 

The Hegaxon NPU has been improved with additional cores that provide a 45% boost to AI processing power, and the Qualcomm AI Engine has also had upgrades to support the new Oryon CPU. The idea is that the CPU helps initiate the workload, taking on the heavy lifting while the NPU focuses on the AI processing. 

There’s also an improved process with more Tokens to play with. Tokens are units of information, be it text, voice input, photos or videos, and with an expansion of tokens, you can essentially upload larger documents, photos or audio files for AI processing. 

Importantly, the new chipset allows AI assistants to analyse what you can see via your smartphone’s camera in real time, allowing users to ask about objects in their environment. It also supports personalised AI Assistants using personal on-device data, which sounds a lot like the Agentic AI support of the competing MediaTek Dimensity 9400. 

This boost to AI smarts allows for some cool new tricks. As well as existing features like AI Expansion, AI Super Resolution and AI Segmentation, there’s a new AI-powered ISP that allows AI to adjust elements like autofocus, auto white balance and auto exposure for a boost to camera performance. 

There’s also what Qualcomm calls Insight AI. It’s essentially AI tech that allows for limitless segmentation of images captured on your smartphone, allowing it to independently tweak elements like colour and brightness to refine specific sections of an image. It also powers real-time relighting in video calls and livestreams via a virtual, movable light source that reacts to the contours of your face.

There’s also new Video Object Eraser tech. It’s essentially the same idea behind Photo Object Eraser but for videos, removing distracting elements from your videos at up to 1080p@30fps.

Now, here’s the catch; just because the Snapdragon 8 Elite supports all these cool AI features, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be available on all 8 Elite-equipped smartphones. Ultimately, it’s down to manufacturers to decide which 8 Elite AI features to integrate into their smartphones. 

Which smartphones will feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite?

Given just how widely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was adopted among OEMs, it’s safe to say that the Snapdragon 8 Elite will appear in a lot of the top-end flagships over the next 12 months. 

While Qualcomm isn’t in the business of revealing other manufacturers’ launch plans, it has confirmed that it’ll be used in upcoming devices from Asus, Honor, iQoo, OnePlus, Oppo, RealMe, Samsung, Xiaomi and more.