Everything you need to know about the chip powering your next Android flagship smartphone

Like clockwork, Qualcomm is back with another new flagship mobile chipset, and it’s a big one. The Snapdragon 8 Elite isn’t just rocking a new naming scheme, a first since 2021. It also represents one of the biggest overhauls to one of the most popular mobile SoC lineups in ages, complete with a brand-new CPU that could make this year’s smartphones look like ancient history. If you’re wondering what’s up with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, here’s everything you need to know.

What is Snapdragon 8 Elite?

If you keep up with Qualcomm’s product launches, you can probably figure out what the Snapdragon 8 Elite represents right from its name. If not, a quick history lesson. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors have powered a huge selection of Android phones around the globe, and since 2013, the vast majority of flagships have included chips from the company’s 800-series. In 2021, in an attempt to streamline its naming structure, Qualcomm delivered the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, followed by two successors, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

This year, we’re getting another rebrand. Snapdragon 8 Elite fills its role as the next-gen flagship chipset, to be sure, but the new name is bound to confuse shoppers. Qualcomm says “Elite” is reserved for the best of its products, but there’s no doubt that the branding is to align this SoC with the Snapdragon X Elite chip launched earlier this year. While the Snapdragon X-series focuses on laptops, the Snapdragon 8-series will continue to power Qualcomm’s mobile ambitions.

What you need to know about the Snapdragon 8 Elite

So why the pairing with the Snapdragon X-series? It all comes down to the CPU, the biggest change in a Snapdragon chipset in generations. Rather than using customized cores from ARM built into the Kryo CPU, Qualcomm’s new chipset is using a second-gen Oryon CPU, built internally from the ground up. Oryon was initially developed for Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite marks its debut on smartphones.

The result is a pretty radical shift in its underlying architecture. In previous years, Qualcomm — as with any chipmaker — has relied on an ever-changing combination of prime, performance, and efficiency cores. Depending on the task at hand, your phone chooses between these cores to intelligently provide the right mixture of raw horsepower and energy conservation. It’s why your Galaxy S24 Ultra can power through Genshin Impact at ultra-high settings while simultaneously maintaining a steady level of energy when it’s in standby mode on your desk.

This year, Qualcomm has completely ditched efficiency cores. Its 8-core Oryon CPU combines two prime cores running at a whopping 4.32GHz with six performance cores clocked at 3.53GHz. Despite the massive shift in architecture, Qualcomm says this new CPU is 44 percent more power efficient than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Basically, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is designed to deliver faster performance for practically any task without sacrificing battery life, though we’ll have to wait until devices running this chip are in the wild to put that to the test.

Curious how that stands up to previous generations of Snapdragon processors? Here’s a full list of specs below.

In case you missed it, there are a couple of other big changes worth highlighting in that table above. This chipset is Qualcomm’s first to use TSMC’s second-gen 3nm process, the same N3E node Apple’s using for its A18 chips and that MediaTek is using for its recently-announced Dimensity 9400. It might not be first to the table, but like its rivals, Qualcomm has this new fabrication method to thank for the huge jumps in power-saving metrics it’s parading this year.

While the CPU might be the big change this time around, it’s not the only thing worth paying attention to. Mobile gamers will be thrilled with Qualcomm’s latest Adreno GPU, which delivers 40 percent improvements to performance and 35 percent improvements to ray tracing in supported titles. While I continue to think the flagship Snapdragon series is overkill considering what’s truly popular on the Play Store, support for Unreal Engine 5 Nanite and Unreal’s Chaos Physics should allow for some console-quality titles to hopefully, finally, trickle over to Android. If not, you’ll find me sticking with Balatro.

Outside of Qualcomm’s new CPU, AI is the space where the company remains as focused as ever. At launch, it’s difficult to say exactly what new experiences the Snapdragon 8 Elite might power — it’s up to OEMs and partners like Samsung to build those, after all — but we do have an idea of what the chipset is capable of.

This generation, Qualcomm is focused on speeding up on-device multi-modal LLMs. Snapdragon 8 Elite is capable of directly delivering your speech prompts to supported LLMs rather than translating your words to text. Likewise, support for live-view and imported photos allow for improved detection of your surroundings, though it’s unclear how this differs from existing supported applications like Google Lens. Qualcomm’s AI-centric focus extends to the camera as well, with the new AI ISP focused on using AI to capture clearer photos of fast-moving objects like pets, remove objects from videos, and adjust skin tones in poor lighting conditions — all, in most cases, on device. Look for my forthcoming thoughts from in-person demos to appear here later this week.

What devices will the Snapdragon 8 Elite power?

So far, Qualcomm has confirmed devices from Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Oppo, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, and Xiaomi are due to be announced “in the coming weeks.” Some of these are pretty easy to clue in on. Samsung, for example, is almost certainly a reference to the forthcoming Galaxy S25 series, while the OnePlus 13 is set to debut in China sometime before the end of October. We’re still early into Snapdragon Summit, so don’t be surprised if one or more of these companies tease new phones before the end of the week, as we saw with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered Xiaomi 14 last year.

As always, it’s key to remember what won’t be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and that’s Google’s forthcoming Pixel 10. That phone will use whatever succeeds Google’s in-house Tensor G4 — almost certainly to be called the Tensor G5 — which has been heavily rumored to be making the swap to TSMC foundries from Samsung.

It’s a big shift for mobile’s most popular flagship chipset

As I publish this, Snapdragon Summit is just kicking off. There’s plenty more to see, including a whole host of demos that should give me a better idea as to what the Snapdragon 8 Elite is capable of, so make sure to check back throughout the week for my impressions. As the name suggests, Qualcomm is presenting this chipset as an all-new era of mobile computing. Hopefully, we won’t need to wait too long to see just how that translates to real-world devices.