American chip manufacturer Qualcomm has launched its new flagship Snapdragon Elite 8 System-on-Chip (SoC) designed for the next generation of premium smartphones. The chipset comes at a time when Qualcomm is dedicating its efforts towards making chips that are more powerful for generative AI tasks.
The Elite 8 chip is a successor to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and will be integrating Oryon CPU, a custom computing technology that also powers the Snapdragon X Elite platform for PCs.
The company also announced that a number of smartphone brands will be launching devices with the Snapdragon Elite SoC in the coming weeks. These include ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, Realme, Samsung, Vivo, and Xiaomi.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite incorporates a Qualcomm AI Engine that combines the CPU, GPU and a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU). According to Qualcomm, the NPU is designed to offer 45% better AI performance and 45% improved efficiency per watt along with support for on-device multi-modal generative AI applications.
The NPU also powers Qualcomm’s “AI ISP” (image signal processor), enabling AI-driven camera features such as Semantic Segmentation at 4K resolution and an on-device video object eraser for removing unwanted elements from videos.
It will be interesting to see how many premium smartphones are launched in the next few months with this chip and how they leverage this level of performance for AI tasks.
