Qualcomm Says New Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC Has 'World's Fastest Mobile CPU'

Qualcomm today unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which features a next-generation custom Qualcomm-designed Oryon CPU instead of the semi-custom Kryo Arm-based chips from prior SoCs. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features the "world's fastest mobile CPU," outperforming even the A18 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro series.

snapdragon 8 elite
The Oryon CPU is built on a 3-nanometer process, much like Apple's most recent chips. It has eight cores in total, including two prime cores and six performance cores, and it is able to reach peak CPU speeds of 4.32 GHz. Qualcomm also claims that it has the "industry's largest shared cache" to enable "insanely fast data retrieval." There's also a new "Adreno" GPU, and Qualcomm says it uses a "revolutionary sliced architecture" for faster performance and battery life optimizations.

Qualcomm built the chip with generative AI in mind, and it has an included Qualcomm AI Engine with Multimodal Gen AI that Qualcomm says can better understand voice, text, and images, viewing the world through the camera on a smartphone to help with tasks.

snapdragon 8 elite info
Compared to prior-generation Qualcomm chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features 45 percent faster CPU performance and 44 percent better power efficiency.

The chip integrates the Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G modem with Wi-Fi 7 and 5G support. It will be used in Android-based devices from companies like Google, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and more.

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Top Rated Comments

vertsix Avatar
12 months ago
If so, good. Competition is good.
Score: 57 Votes (Like | Disagree)
GMShadow Avatar
12 months ago
Is the claim 'fastest clock speed' or 'fastest when we put eleventy billion cores against one Apple core'?

Their footnote says compared to a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and a 45% ST improvement would put them at 3,101. A18 Pro is 3350ish. That's wouldn't be the fastest so it sounds like more Qualcomm bullcrap.

Multithread would be about 9,690 compared to 8,080ish, but that's with eight cores to six...so again, not an even comparison, but not a surprise from Qualcomm.


And their launch partners are mostly known benchmark cheaters, so I hope the testers take that into account.
Score: 29 Votes (Like | Disagree)
iMean Avatar
12 months ago
Pffft, we all know that 8GB Apple RAM equals 16 GB Android RAM, so 4 Ghz 8 Core Android CPU equals 2 Ghz 4 Core Apple CPU. So, all good.
Score: 29 Votes (Like | Disagree)
brofkand Avatar
12 months ago
If all of this is true, we knew it was a matter of time that the competition would catch up. Even Intel is making great strides with moving x86 closer to ARM (although they're still quite a ways off). Apple Silicon truly revolutionized the industry, and Apple should get a lot of credit for it. Although I'm quite critical of Apple in a lot of aspects, the M3 15" MacBook Air is the best laptop I've ever owned, and in my opinion the best laptop ever built.
Score: 23 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ss2cire Avatar
12 months ago
Neat, I think anything that pushes apple to improve their SoCs is a good thing :)
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
anshuvorty Avatar
12 months ago
Ok, what about that heat dissipation, sounds like it will get pretty toasty...
Score: 16 Votes (Like | Disagree)