Big Kahuna

Think of Maui in Hawaii and you’d likely associate the Pacific island with white beaches, extravagant vacations and glorious sunsets. But for a few days each year, the island transforms into a hotbed of the latest innovations in the smartphone space, with execs from Qualcomm launching the flagship chip that will power the hottest Android flagships in the months to come. This year was no different, with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset arriving amidst a sea of benchmarking-topping claims, one-upping the recent chip launches by rivals Apple and MediaTek. But what the all-new Snapdragon 8 Elite hold for phones in the months to come, and what should folks like you and me look forward to? 

If the ‘Elite’ branding sounds familiar, thank the X Elite chips that have literally turned the corner for Windows laptops off late. Beyond the name, Qualcomm has leveraged the X Elite’s Oryon CPU into a second-generation avatar, optimized for mobile. Like Apple’s A18 chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is built on the 3-nanometer process, a jump from the 4nm process that the current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 uses, allowing for better performance and power efficiency. 

With two ‘prime’ cores running at a faster 4.3GHz and six performance cores running at 3.53GHz, the efficiency cores of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 are a thing of the past, and the 8 Elite yields 45-percent gains on single- and multi-core tasks while using about 27% less power than the already efficient predecessor. While these performance gains are yet to be seen on commercially available devices like the upcoming OnePlus 13, Xiaomi 15 and the Realme GT7 Pro, initial benchmark on reference devices has the new chip pulling ahead of the A18 Pro and the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 on single-core and multicore tasks, although Apple maintained a significant edge on graphics tasks. The overclocked ‘for Galaxy’ variant of the chip should go even further, and with support for the Unreal Engine 5.3 with Nanite, games are now theoretically support ultra-realistic, film-quality 3D environments. Emphasis on the word theoretically – one hopes this is a clarion call for game developers to start delivering more AAA titles for Android.

Beyond performance, phones sporting the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip will see gains in the imaging department as well, with interesting new capabilities like object detection and deletion in videos, plus tweaks to identify pets better so that you can nail those photos of your hyperactive furry friends. Ring lights could be a thing of the past too, with 8 Elite offering an ‘AI Relighting’ feature, which analyzes the live feed from the camera and allows you to place a virtual, movable light source to illuminate parts of your face that aren’t well lit, without blowing out your skin tone. 

Other everyday gains include faster web browsing, not just in the browser but for apps that pull information from the web, which would include sports, entertainment, shopping and news apps. The 8 Elite chip also supports the new XPAN audio feature, which allows for Bluetooth audio to transition to Wi-Fi when you step away from your phone, as long as you stay on the same Wi-Fi network. Ergo, no more dropped audio or patchy calls if you’re the sort who walks and talks…but you will have to upgrade your Bluetooth headset to a range of XPAN-compatible devices launching next year. 

And finally, big gains on the AI front, with the phone now packing in the ability to support multimodal generative AI, with text, photo, sound and video as inputs. This allows an 8 Elite phone to do things like recognize and describe live images or do stuff like calculate each person’s share on a restaurant bill or even summarize lengthy documents by merely pointing the phone camera and letting the phone’s smarts do their thing.