It’s that time of year again: Qualcomm has introduced its new and improved flagship mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, at the annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii.
Essentially a renamed version of the much-rumored Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (although Qualcomm isn’t ready to confirm that much yet), the 8 Elite is a de facto successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and will likely rival Samsung’s Galaxy S25 provide power. , OnePlus 13 and many more of the best phones we expect to see released in 2025.
“Our flagship mobile platforms now adopt the Elite name, demonstrating the remarkable progress it means for the industry,” Qualcomm said in a statement announcing the launch, which comes just a month after Apple and Meditek released their latest flagship chipsets – the A18 – unveiled. Pro and Dimensity 9400, respectively.
The 8 Elite is the first Snapdragon mobile chipset to feature Qualcomm’s second-generation Oryon CPU, and is designed to “handle the complexity of multimodal AI better” than any mobile chipset before it. In other words, next year’s best Android phones will certainly also be among the best AI phones.
Forgive us for getting technical, but the Oryon’s two main CPU cores offer peak speeds of 4.32 GHz – believed to be the fastest in the industry – and six new performance cores that each reach peak speeds of 3.53 GHz. Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipset also does away with efficiency cores, two of which are featured in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
What does all that mean in layman’s terms? Because the CPU in mobile chipsets is used for application processing, all phones equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite should offer faster app launches, more seamless multitasking, and more powerful generative AI capabilities than their Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-equipped predecessors.
Mobile chipsets also feature a GPU for graphics processing (read: gaming – more on that below) and an NPU for machine learning (ML) applications, although Qualcomm is most excited about the addition of its Oryon CPU, saying: “The Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform represents the pinnacle of Snapdragon innovation. As the Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts in our mobile roadmap, we’re delivering unprecedented performance. This meaning deserves a new, special, most premium variant of our leading 8 series.”
A gift for gamers
When it comes to gaming, next year’s flagship Android phones could threaten the iPhone 16 Pro Max as the best gaming phone.
The Andreno GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite features Qualcomm’s first-ever sliced architecture, which enables a higher clock speed, higher frame rate, and better battery efficiency (that means sharper visuals, smoother gameplay, and longer gameplay sessions) than the GPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The Andreno can also store 12MB of data directly on the GPU, sending less graphics data to the chipset’s DDR memory.
Additionally, the Snapdragon 8 Elite supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, which enables the rendering of up to 9,000 unique objects and the destruction of up to 1,000 objects in less than 5 ms of latency. Likewise, support for Unreal Engine’s Nanite solution will enable a “huge increase” in geometric complexity and the rendering of “movie-quality environments in your mobile game” – let’s hope Qualcomm isn’t referring to recent Marvel films there, eh ?
There’s plenty more to say about the Snapdragon 8 Elite, of course – and we’ll report on several never-before-seen features throughout our week at the Snapdragon Summit – but for now, all you need to know is that the next wave of flagship Android phones will pack a serious punch; provided that Samsung et al. can make good use of all that wonderful power. Here is the hope!