Qualcomm has launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite, its successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 flagship smartphone processor introduced last year. The big news is that it’s the company’s first smartphone chip to integrate the Arm-compatible Oryon processor obtained through its Nuvia acquisition and already employed in the Snapdragon X Elite PC processor. The 8 Elite also refreshes the Adreno GPU architecture, updates the Hexagon AI accelerator (NPU), and revamps Qualcomm’s image processor (ISP). The first phones based on the new processor are due by the end of the year.
Oryon is an Eight-CPU Constellation
Like its PC-processor stablemate, the 8 Elite has eight CPUs, operating two at a faster rate than the others. Owing to its higher peak frequency, single-thread performance exceeds that of the Cortex-X925 that MediaTek employs in its new flagship processor. Independent (and unverified) testers online indicate that single-thread performance slightly trails that of the Apple A18 Pro in the top-end iPhone. Key Nuvia team members hail from Apple and designed the predecessors to the A18’s CPUs. Integrating more fast cores and no little ones, the Snapdragon’s multicore throughput tops that of the iPhone chip.
Compared with its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the 8 Elite’s CPU cluster is 44% more efficient and 45% faster. However, real-world efficiency is hard to gauge. Reducing the new CPU’s frequency and voltage so that it delivers the same performance at lower power yields a tantalizing efficiency improvement but isn’t necessarily a common operating point for a processor in the field. Early press reports also point to benchmarking shenanigans; view any claims with skepticism.
Better, Faster XPUs
Qualcomm similarly reports the new GPU is 40% faster than its predecessor and also 40% more efficient. Ray-tracing is faster and consumes less memory bandwidth. Combined with the faster CPUs, gaming performance should see a big boost. Last year’s Snapdragon 8 was the first smartphone chip to support Unreal Engine 5, which should lead to more PC games coming to mobile platforms. This year, Qualcomm seems particularly excited by a title featuring a blindfolded and preternaturally busty woman wielding a sword—an impractical and implausible constellation of attributes for a warrior but a recipe for slapstick hijinks.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite’s Hexagon NPU is < 45% faster (read: “up to 45% faster”) on the MobileBert language model and is similarly more efficient. Speedup varies among tests, however. On the Llama 7B large language model, token generation is < 100% faster.
The ISP is faster and better than its predecessor, delivering improved gen-AI effects like image expansion, segmentation, and resolution enhancement. The NPU executes some of the AI-based image-processing effects, and the direct link between the ISP and the NPU that was added with the 8 Gen 3 has been overhauled.
The new Snapdragon updates the companion connectivity chip (FastConnect 7900) and the integrated 5G modem. In addition to incremental improvements, the former adds a UWB radio, and the latter now supports narrowband nonterrestrial (extraterrestrial?) networks (NB-NTN). The UWB capability improves positioning features ala Apple AirTags, and the new NB-NTN spec standardizes satellite-based 5G messaging.
Parting Thoughts
Smartphone processors aren’t the biggest chips, but they are among the most complex, integrating multiple processor units, a modem, and other functions to perform communication, photography, computing, and even simple things like acting as a pocket calculator (the application that begat the first CPU). They integrated NPUs before PC processors did. Their CPU performance now rivals that of a PC processor, and graphics features are catching up. The latter should help game developers share a code base for console, PC, and mobile platforms.
The Qualcomm 8 Gen Elite incorporates many incremental updates compared with its predecessor and large CPU, GPU, and NPU performance gains. We expect it to outperform the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 in most regards but won’t push it out of the arena. Finally, Android phones’ CPU performance nearly meets (single thread) or beats (multithread) that of the best iPhone.
This year’s CPU-performance uplift comes at the price of an expensive acquisition and a legal battle with Arm. Meanwhile, it’s possible that Qualcomm could’ve achieved similar performance by licensing the Cortex-X925 from Arm. It will take a few more product generations to properly assess the costs (including opportunity costs) of Qualcomm’s do-it-yourself approach compared with licensing.
Above all, we’re thankful that Stable Diffusion is no longer being demoed to show off smartphone processors’ AI performance. Image generation was a entertaining trick at first, but improving a capability nobody wants became tiresome. Qualcomm instead is now highlighting practical (albeit contrived) AI-based applications.
When it comes to AI, the company isn’t viewed in the same light as Nvidia. Nonetheless, it’s investing heavily in the technology alongside advancing its smartphone processors every year. AI holds tremendous potential as a personal technology, and Qualcomm is well positioned to enable an app developer to unleash it.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite die shot.
Above with annotations (the SLC doesn’t look right, could be the NPU).