On October 21st, Hawaii time, Qualcomm unveiled its new flagship mobile platform at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, USA, and named it "Snapdragon 8 Elite", also known as Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition in Chinese.
In terms of naming, Qualcomm did not continue the previously reported 8Gen4 in the media, partly due to significant adjustments made to the architecture. Qualcomm stated that for the first time, the platform adopts second-generation customized Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm AdrenoGPU, and enhanced Qualcomm HexagonNPU to achieve terminal side multimodal generative AI applications. These technologies have also empowered many other experiences, including the use of the company's powerful AI-ISP imaging capabilities, next-generation gaming experiences, and ultra fast web browsing.
It is reported that the new architecture of Qualcomm Oryon CPU has a maximum clock speed of 4.32GHz, which is 45% higher than Snapdragon 8Gen 3 single core performance and 45% higher than multi-core performance. In terms of power consumption, the CPU and GPU are reduced by 44% and 40% respectively.
Compared to the previous generation, the second-generation Oryon CPU platform brings two significant changes. Firstly, compared to the "1+5+2" core architecture in Snapdragon 8Gen3, the efficiency core has been eliminated and a new "2+6" configuration has been adopted, consisting of two super cores (with a maximum clock speed of 4.32GHz) and six performance cores (with a clock speed of 3.53GHz). Qualcomm believes that the redesigned performance kernel can better balance performance and energy consumption; Another major improvement for Qualcomm is the memory architecture. In Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition, each CPU cluster is equipped with the largest cache, with 12MB of L2 cache per CPU cluster, totaling 24MB of dedicated cache tightly coupled with the CPU.
In terms of GPU, Adreno 830 is used, with official claims of a 40% increase in peak performance, a 35% increase in ray tracing performance, and a 40% reduction in power consumption. It is worth mentioning that the GPU adopts a brand new slicing structure, dividing the internal rendering unit into three independent slices and running them at the corresponding main frequency of 1100MHz, which can achieve dynamic adjustment and flexible deployment of GPU performance.
As the year of the explosion of big models from cloud to end, Apple, MediaTek, and Qualcomm do not want to miss this opportunity. Qualcomm has significantly upgraded the AI engine on Snapdragon 8 Ultimate, adding additional cores to both the scalar and vector accelerators of the Hexagon NPU: the vector accelerator now has 6 cores and the scalar accelerator has 8 cores to meet the growing demand for generative AI computing. In terms of performance, the upgraded NPU has increased inference speed by 45% and performance per watt by 45% compared to the previous generation.
In addition, the multimodal assistant based on Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition will support more model operations, including LMM, LLM, LVM, and ASR.
At the press conference, Xiaomi Senior Vice President Zeng Xuezhong and Honor CMO Guo Rui gave speeches and announced that the new phones equipped with Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition - Xiaomi 15 Series and Honor Magci 7 Series - will be released in October.
It is reported that leading OEM manufacturers and smartphone brands such as Xiaomi, Honor, Asus, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Redmi, Realme, Samsung, vivo, ZTE, etc. will release terminals equipped with Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition in the coming weeks.
In addition, some media reported that Qualcomm may collaborate with Samsung to launch the Snapdragon 8 Ultimate Edition for Galaxy chip. The official response was: "Qualcomm does not comment on the product roadmap