Devices from the likes of Asus, Honor, OnePlus, Motorola, Oppo, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi will launch in coming weeks and months powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform.
Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform – which has just been unveiled at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii – is the “most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever”.
The first in-mobile Qualcomm Oryon CPU is the successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 – tips it would be known as Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 proved to be incorrect – and is described by Qualcomm as having “unparalleled processing power, ground-breaking AI enhancements, and an array of never-before-seen mobile innovations”.
“Earlier this year we debuted [Qualcomm Oryon CPU] in PCs, delivering remarkable experiences and unparallel battery life to PC users, energising the industry and getting the attention of consumers,” says said Chris Patrick, Senior Vice President and GM of Mobile Handsets.
“Today, our second generation of the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our flagship Mobile Platform – it’s a major leap forward…”
The platform has on-device AI, including multimodal Gen AI and personalisation, and Qualcomm says it’s capable of supporting voice, text, and image prompts.
Mobile gaming is improved via the Qualcomm Adreno GPU’s newly sliced architecture, the company says.
“The first-in-mobile Qualcomm Oryon CPU delivers a 45 per cent performance boost, 44 per cent greater power efficiency, and the mobile industry’s largest shared data cache,” Qualcomm says.
“Our Qualcomm Adreno GPU … achieves 40 per cent enhanced performance and 40 per cent improved efficiency.”
System-wide, the company claims overall power savings of 27 per cent.
The new AI ISP is directly fused with the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU and has AI-backed 5G and Wi-Fi 7 capabilities.
Camera features include “limitless semantic segmentation at 4K resolution”.
Per IBM: “Semantic segmentation is one of three sub-tasks in the overall process of image segmentation that helps computers understand visual information.”
The new CPU has an on-device video object eraser, which can remove unwanted elements from videos, while Insight AI “provides real-time skin and sky adjustments to create more natural colour and lighting in uncertain conditions”.
There is mobile-first support for Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite solution, which enables “astonishing film-quality 3D environments in smartphone gaming”, and support for Unreal’s Chaos Physics Engine, which it promises delivers “lifelike object interactions and simulations, even in complex scenes”.
The Snapdragon Sound Technology Suite with Qualcomm aptX lossless technology delivers up to 24-bit 48kHz bluetooth music streaming and up to 24-bit 96kHz Wi-Fi music streaming.
Qualcomm says its Expanded Personal Area Network (XPAN) technology enables whole-building untethered audio coverage, aided by ultra-low power Wi-Fi 7.
