By Allison Johnson , a reviewer with 10 years of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telec

Qualcomm’s new mobile chip is the 8 Elite

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2024-10-22 06:00:05

By Allison Johnson , a reviewer with 10 years of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.

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.”