Qualcomm brings laptop-class CPU cores to phones with Snapdragon 8 Elite

Qualcomm has a new chip for flagship phones, and the best part is that it uses an improved version of the Oryon CPU architecture that the Snapdragon X Elite chips brought to Windows PCs earlier this year.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3—yet another change to the naming convention that Qualcomm uses for its high-end phone chips, though, as usual, the number 8 is still involved. The 8 Elite uses a “brand-new, 2nd-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU” with clock speeds up to 4.32 GHz, which Qualcomm says will improve performance by about 45 percent compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Rather than a mix of large, medium, and small CPU cores as it has used in the past, the 8 Elite has two “Prime” cores for hitting that high peak clock speed, while the other six are all “Performance” cores that peak at a lower 3.53 GHz. But it doesn’t look like Qualcomm is using a mix of different CPU architectures anymore, choosing to distinguish the higher-performing core from the lower-performing ones by clock speed alone.

Qualcomm promises a similar 40 percent performance boost from the new Adreno 830 GPU. The chip also includes a marginally improved Snapdragon X80 5G modem, up from an X75 modem in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3—its main improvement appears to be support for additional antennas, for a total of six, but the download speed still tops out at a theoretical 10Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 support appears to be the same as in the 8 Gen 3, but the 8 Elite does support the Bluetooth 6.0 standard, up from Bluetooth 5.4 in the 8 Gen 3.