Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite 7-core version, tuned for foldables to efficiently handle thermal management. While there’s one less core compared to the original version of the chip, the rest of the 7-core version remains identical as the Processor that was launched last year.
Snapdragon 8 Elite 7-core version chipset: Details
The new Snapdragon 8 Elite 7-core version chip is based on the second-gen 3nm process from TSMC. It comprises of the seven-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU with a 64-bit Architecture. While efficiency cores have been omitted completely, there are 2x prime cores clocked at 4.32 GHz and five other performance cores running at up to 3.53 GHz clock speed. The original Snapdragon 8 Elite has six performance cores.
The all new Adreno GPU has support for real-time hardware-based ray tracing, Unreal Engine 5.3 running Nanite on smartphones and Chaos Physics engine, HDR gaming, Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, and more.
For wireless connectivity, it gets the Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 system with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth v6.0, up to 6Ghz spectral band, and peak speeds of 5.8 Gbps. There’s the X80 5GModem that supports peak download speeds of up to 10 Gbps. Further, there’s USB-C 3.1 Gen 2 port support as well.
The devices equipped with this Chipset can load up to 24GB of LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.0 storage. It has 24MB L2 cache. As for cameras, there’s an AI-based triple 18-bit ISP with support for up to 320MP photo capture paired up to 10-bit colour depth video and photo capture, Google Ultra HDR photo capture, HDR 10+, Dolby Vision, and more.
The enhanced image signal processing (ISP) is now better integrated with the new Hexagon NPU, delivering better HDR, more natural skin tones, improved sky colors, and enhanced Autofocus performance. Qualcomm has also introduced chip-level photo and video semantic segmentation, along with a video object eraser feature.
There’s further support for triple video capture from HDR image Sensors with seamless switching between any HDR mode. The Snapdragon 8 Elite additionally supports 8K Resolution video shooting up to 30 FPS, 4K video shooting up to 120 fps, or 1080p slo-mo video capture at 480fps.
For display, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 7-core version chip can support up to 4K resolution running at 60Hz or QHD+ at 240Hz. Next, in terms of audio, it gets Qualcomm’s Aqstic codec support with Aqstic smart speaker amplifier and spatial audio with head tracking. In terms of security, the chipset has Trust Management Engine, Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor, 3D Sonic Max and more.
For AI, the new Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) enables AI tasks to run 45% faster with greater energy efficiency. Qualcomm’s AI Engine now supports multimodal Gen AI, allowing large and small models to operate with enhanced capabilities, including processing up to 70 tokens on SLMs. Lastly, the chipset supports Quick Charge 5.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm also seems to be working on the Snapdragon 8s Elite chipset which will be a watered down version of the 8 Elite. It would be the successor to last year’s 8s Gen 3 and would be available in devices costing cheaper than the 8 Elite-powered smartphones without compromising on performance much.