Qualcomm’s new mobile chip is the 8 Elite

Just a few years after changing its mobile chipset naming conventions, Qualcomm has gone and done it again. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company's newest high-end smartphone SoC, and like the laptop chips it borrows its "Elite" name from, it comes with a new Oryon CPU. The company says that this shift enables faster performance and - lest we forget about AI - offers on-device support for multimodal intelligence.

The Oryon CPU inside the 8 Elite hasn't been borrowed directly from the laptop chips; Qualcomm is calling it a second-gen chipset. It replaces the Kryo CPUs Qualcomm has used in previous mobile chipsets and comprises two prime 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 mobile handset SVP, what all of that upgraded hardware would translate to in the hands of smartphone users, and the examples he gave boiled down to more desktop-like performance from a phone. Websites that aren't well optimized for mobile will "run very quickly and feel light," and heavy games will run more effortlessly. "Your chipset kind of fades into the background and you just do whatever you want to do - just like we're kind of used to on desktop experiences."

And just in case you forgot that 2024 is the year of AI on phones, the 8 Elite comes with some NPU upgrades, too. The upgraded Hexagon NPU supports on-device multimodal AI assistants that can handle text input as well as visuals. There's also support for an on-device AI-powered video object eraser tool to remove distractions from video clips, which sounds kind of wild and difficult to pull off convincingly. We won't know just how effective this tool might be until an OEM puts it in one of their phones, but my money is on Samsung introducing it as a feature on the Galaxy S25.

If Samsung launches a phone with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we likely won't see it until early next year, but we probably won't have to wait that long for 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."