Qualcomm reveals the Snapdragon 8 Elite as the fastest CPU in the world

Qualcomm has unveiled its Snapdragon 8 Elite, which it claims is the world’s fastest central processing unit (CPU).

The CPU is equipped with Qualcomm’s second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which the company said will power the new era of AI that creates the device. It’s built to handle a wide range of AI problems seamlessly while prioritizing privacy. This means that you will soon see the amazing visuals of Unreal Engine 5 in your mobile games.

Speaking at its annual Snapdragon Conference in Maui this week, Qualcomm said that leading smartphone manufacturers and brands including Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi, and others, are about to launch devices powered by the Snapdragon 8. Elite, in the coming weeks.

Cisco Cheng, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, said in a press conference that the new system product is aimed at mobile devices coming later this year where the priority is to balance efficiency and performance. .

Cheng said that the Hexagon NPU has 12 times the performance of the previous generation. The Oryon CPU has triple functionality. And the Adreno GPU has triple the performance.

In total, the device has more than 40 components integrated into a system-on-chip design, where customers can mix and match the components they want in their final designs.

Cheng also said that Oryon’s Prime core is a new microarchitecture that is 46% more efficient than the original version. It operates at 4.32 GHz.

“This fundamental approach and our well-established understanding of mobile experiences allow us to optimize every part of the CPU and everything attached to it,” Cheng said.

It also fetches data faster than before, allowing the core to execute the next command faster. Alongside the two Prime cores are six performance cores. Over the years, Qualcomm has reduced the number of “power” cores and has now completely replaced them with performance cores. The processing cores provide a measure of efficiency and performance, reaching a maximum speed of 3.53GHz. It has a cache of 24MB.

Qualcomm has also improved the in-app experience, multitasking, AI development, video rendering and streaming, as well as games.

“There is no other case that will benefit you more than a game,” he said.

It will provide smoother gaming with higher framerates and increase the gaming time up to 2.5 hours with 40% better battery efficiency and 40% better GPU performance. It supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, which runs the game’s physics simulations on the device in real-time.

There can be up to 9,000 objects on the screen at once. The chip can store 12 megabytes of data directly on the GPU. The result is longer game times, as well as better ray-tracing performance.

The Snapdragon mobile team has been working with Feral Interactive on the Grid Legends mobile racing game. It will only launch with Qualcomm Adaptive Performance Engine 4.0 for Snapdragon 8 Elite users.

And for the first time, Nanite’s Unreal Engine 5 solution will work on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It makes for a huge increase in movie quality levels in mobile games.

The platform features industry-leading technologies such as the latest Qualcomm Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) and the upgraded Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all of which provide improved gaming performance.

These new features empower the Snapdragon 8 Elite to transform users’ experiences with their devices – making multi-generational AI applications a reality on Snapdragon-powered smartphones.

This technology also powers many other experiences across camera capabilities, with our most powerful AI-ISP, as well as next-level gaming, super-fast web browsing and more. other.

Gen AI devices that appeared two years ago will run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. It integrates multimodal gen AI applications and delivers these experiences directly to the device, quickly and with very low latency.

Cheng said the Qualcomm AI Engine will tap the Oryon CPU for the latest AI tasks. The Hexagon NPU is equipped with high-throughput accelerators for faster performance. It allows AI and computer vision tasks to live in memory. AI assistant experiences can be fully functional on the device.

AI assistants running on your smartphone can also adapt to you, working with the device itself to ensure privacy, Cheng said. AI magnification will enlarge the photo beyond the limits of your device, high resolution AI sharpens, and AI features enhance and identify individual objects in each scene.

AI ISP (image signal processing) works with Hexagon NPU for functions such as auto white balance. The ISP used to process the image and transfer it to the NPU. The NPU is now able to access old raw sensor data and implement real-time AI updates at 4K and 60 frames per second. This results in more accurate results and makes it easier for developers to implement their algorithms in any situation.

It also brings AI features that were only available in the cloud into the app.

“We call this Insight AI” to elevate photography to a new level, Cheng said. You can pick up natural skintones in the most difficult lighting conditions, such as when you’re brightly lit, Cheng said. You can remove objects from the video using the eraser. You highlight something and you can delete it without having to send the video to the cloud.

It has a second generation 5G AI processor, as well as WiFi 7 improved AI, for better connectivity with lower power consumption.

“We are very excited to bring the power of Qualcomm Oryon to our Snapdragon mobile platforms for the first time. Earlier this year we launched it on PCs, offering amazing experiences and battery life that is unmatched for PC users, powering the industry and capturing consumer attention,” said Chris Patrick, executive vice president and general manager of mobile handsets, Qualcomm, in a statement. . “Today, our second-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU debuts on our mobile platform – it’s a big step forward and we expect customers to enjoy the new experiences provided by our CPU technology.”

He added, “With the leading capabilities of the CPU, GPU and NPU, the Snapdragon 8 Elite offers remarkable improvements in performance and power. In addition, it transforms the mobile experience by providing AI a personalized, multi-modal direct tool that enables language, context and image understanding to improve everything from productivity to creativity while prioritizing user privacy.