Just a few years after changing mobile chipset naming conventions, Qualcomm has done it again. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company's latest high-end smartphone SoC and, like the laptop chips from which it borrows its “Elite” name, features a new Oryon CPU. The company says this shift enables faster performance and – lest we forget about AI – provides on-device support for multimodal intelligence.
The Oryon CPU in the 8 Elite wasn't directly inherited from the laptop chips; Qualcomm calls it a second-generation chipset. It replaces the Kryo CPUs that Qualcomm used in previous mobile chipsets and consists of two main cores with six performance cores. There's an X80 5G modem RF chip and an Adreno GPU with a new sliced architecture, with dedicated memory allocated to each slice.
I asked Chris Patrick, Qualcomm's SVP of mobile phones, what all of this upgraded hardware would mean in the hands of smartphone users, and the examples he gave amounted to more desktop-like performance from a phone. Websites that are not well optimized for mobile will “run very quickly and feel light,” and large games will run more effortlessly. “Your chipset kind of fades into the background and you just do whatever you want, just like we’re used to in desktop experiences.”
And in case you forgot that 2024 is the year of AI on phones, the 8 Elite also has some NPU upgrades. The updated Hexagon NPU supports multimodal on-device AI assistants that can handle both text input and visual elements. There's also support for an AI-powered on-device video deletion tool to remove distractions from video clips, which sounds kind of wild and is hard to do convincingly. We won't know how effective this tool might be until an OEM builds it into one of their phones, but I'm betting on Samsung to introduce it as a feature on the Galaxy S25.
If Samsung launches a phone with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we probably won't see it until early next year, but we probably won't have to wait that long to get a good look at the new chipset. The first 8 Elite devices from brands like Asus, Honor, OnePlus, Oppo and Xiaomi are expected to launch “in the coming weeks.”