Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite: Revolutionizing Smartphone Performance and Camera Capabilities

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Chip Will Make Your Phone Less Annoying

Expertise Smartphones | Smartwatches | Tablets | Telecom industry | Mobile semiconductors | Mobile gaming Chief among Qualcomm's newest chips is the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring more AI features and faster speeds to next year's top-tier Android phones. It was announced at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 alongside Qualcomm's other new products. But some of the best things it can do are far more humble than artificial intelligence: It'll fix several pain points that will make using phones less annoying. Although most of the stage time at Snapdragon Summit was dedicated to big-picture advancements, especially forecasting how people will use smartphones differently with so-called "AI Agents," the more mundane improvements will start improving people's phone use the moment they buy a new Snapdragon 8 Elite-packing Android phone. This handful of quality of life features cover a grab bag of topics, but three rise to the top: Improving web browsing, extending wireless audio from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi and using generative AI to apply an artificial light source in your selfies. We're in our first year of generative AI on smartphones, and despite being inundated with promises of how much it will change our mobile life, the most we've gotten are a handful of cool tricks on phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and Google Pixel 9 family. Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature of the iPhone 16 series, hasn't launched yet a month after the phones came out -- a handful of Apple Intelligence features are slated to drop next week. So it's refreshing to see new features in the Snapdragon 8 Elite that will make the way we currently use phones just a bit easier. The coolest annoyance-killing feature is a camera feature powered by generative AI. Instead of removing elements a la Google Pixel's Magic Eraser, this one adds light where it's needed most: on your face. This feature, intended for selfies, acts like a directional soft light source that can illuminate sides of your face that are darkened by shadow. Once turned on, you can tap and hold to move it around, choosing the angle that most flatters you and fits your surroundings. And if you're in a creative mood, you can dial the intensity up and down or even shift the color of the artificial light along the RGB spectrum. I got to play with the feature in a demo and it felt delightfully fun and helpful. I imagine it would be most useful to balance out brightly backlit subjects, like when standing in front of a sunset or sitting inside with an outdoor vista behind you. Though I tried this feature on a reference device, I'm excited by the potential to fix faulty photos and make up for cameras that can't yet handle light and darkness. In a blink-and-you'd-miss-it moment during the Snapdragon Summit keynote, Qualcomm presenters noted that the Snapdragon 8 Elite made web browsing faster. While that's exactly what it sounds like, web pages load faster, it belies just how many phone operations rely on connecting to the web. Currently, a lot of smartphone apps load web browsing information in the background while you navigate through their app interface. "Browsing doesn't just mean opening up a browser and getting particular information," Manju Varma, director of product management focused on CPU technology at Qualcomm, told me at the summit. "The applications will use data for researching, getting sports and entertainment news, shopping -- all this entails what we call browsing." The micro architecture in the new Oryon central processing unit, coming in Qualcomm's mobile chips for the first time with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, enables this speed boost. As a result, cache capacity is increased and memory hierarchy optimized for real-world uses like browsing data on apps. Switching between apps faster is another benefit from the browsing data speed boost. At the summit, Qualcomm set up demo rooms for attendees to test these new features for themselves. One station showed a simple test for faster browsing that had two phones running Browser Bench's online Speedometer 3.0 test, which has machines run through browsing tasks. The Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device (not a commercially available phone) scored 33.7, while the device running last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored 16.1. For comparison's sake, an iPhone 16 Pro scored 29.6, while my own iPhone 15 Pro Max scored 29.7. (The numbers are just a comparative metric and don't represent any specific rate of browser processing, but higher numbers mean better performance.) This improved browsing speed will, yes, even enhance forthcoming generative AI tasks as well as gaming, said Karl Whealton, senior director of product management focusing on CPU and neural processing unit at Qualcomm. "CPU is in everything. Every single thing runs CPU. Some things run it a little bit, some things run it a lot, but everything you do is going to be improved," Whealton said. Last year's Snapdragon Summit was also dominated by generative AI, as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the first to get the new technology. One feature that chip didn't get but was also introduced a year ago, Xpan, will debut on the Snapdragon 8 Elite -- and it should make dropped audio over Bluetooth less common. Put simply, Xpan allows audio to transition from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. This should allow you to roam far away from the source of your music or podcasts and still hear them so long as your headphones or speaker are on the same Wi-Fi network as the phone or computer they're connected to. During this year's summit, one demo showed Xpan in action. In front of me was a wireless speaker, which was blasting music (a pop tune heard over the din of the demo room) from a phone over a hundred feet away. To illustrate, the demo had a camera pointed at the phone, which was at the other end of the building far below on the first floor. This demo showed one scenario, and I'd be interested to see how it handles other obstructions that normally block Bluetooth signals, like distance and solid walls. But if it works, that's one less annoyance you'll have to deal with as your local Wi-Fi network serves as a backup to ensure your music and podcasts don't drop out. This could be a godsend for people in homes and workplaces riddled with building materials that are unfriendly to Bluetooth signals. Each of these three features has the potential to make phones easier to use. Probably the most common complaint every smartphone owner has is, "why doesn't this feature just work?" But let's face it: a lot of stuff does. It's the growing complexity of smartphones and our interconnected web of devices that makes it harder for them to meet our expectations. This applies to hardware and software: Connecting Bluetooth headphones and speakers used to be a challenge, but now we expect it to be quick and seamless. It was a revelation to learn that apps could harness all of a phone's sensors like the gyroscope and GPS; the new frontier is people's expectation that all their data can easily be shared between apps, whether that's health information, passwords or subscriptions. So when companies come along and make it a bit easier for things to work in the background, or add a camera feature that seems like a no-brainer in hindsight, it takes a little bit of the friction out of living our lives through our pocket supercomputers.

Qualcomm made the future of smartphone cameras a lot more exciting | Digital Trends

Qualcomm made big announcement this week. The company just unveiled its new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, and even if you don't keep a particularly close eye on the smartphone chipset world, it's something that's worth getting excited about. Qualcomm is promising substantial performance and efficiency improvements over last year's already excellent Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is great news for next year's slate of flagship Android phones. But there's more to the Snapdragon 8 Elite than it being more powerful and more efficient. It also has the potential to substantially change the way we use the cameras on our phones. How so? I talked to Judd Heape, VP of product management at Qualcomm, to better understand it myself, and I came away significantly more excited about the immediate (and faraway) future of our smartphone cameras. Behind-the-scenes camera upgrades that matter A big part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite is what Qualcomm calls its "AI ISP." An ISP (image signal processor) is a standard component of every smartphone chip, including Snapdragon ones, and is what facilities image processing on your phone's camera. For the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the AI ISP has a much tighter connection to the NPU (neural processing unit) than any other Snapdragon chip before it. That may sound like a lot of technical jargon, but it essentially means that critical camera features should run much better than before. What kind of camera features? One of the most exciting is how the AI ISP should improve auto white balance. Why is that a big deal? "One of the things that cameras get wrong a lot based upon very complex lighting, like lighting an interior versus exterior at the same time, if you're outdoors in a parking lot and the lights are very orange ... that sort of thing," Heape said. "Your skin tone can get really messed up really easily because of that, and that's a failure of auto white balance." Because this new ISP has a tighter connection to the Snapdragon 8 Elite's NPU, it can "generate proper skin tone no matter what the lighting condition is." The really exciting thing is that these auto white balance improvements don't just happen after you've taken a photo. You see those enhancements in real time through the viewfinder, so the image you see as you're taking a picture is what you'll get. Another promising change is that the new ISP consumes less power. "The power consumption also of the ISP has gone down due to the new architecture," Heape said. "So, in really interesting use cases, like 4K 60 fps HDR video recording, the ISP consumes 25% less power ... which means that you'll have less thermal problems when you're trying to shoot videos." Speaking of video, the new ISP also improves Qualcomm's "temporal noise filters." Those filters look at more video frames than before so "the video that you'll shoot is a lot cleaner than it used to be. It was good before but it's even better now." Are these flashy AI camera features like the Google Pixel 9's Add Me mode or the numerous camera/photo editing tools in Galaxy AI? No. But are they ones that could legitimately result in better photos and videos for any phone with a Snapdragon 8 Elite? Absolutely. And that's the type of AI camera enhancements I want to see more of. What does the future of smartphone cameras look like? Beyond immediate enhancements coming with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Heape also shared a few insights about what the greater future of smartphone cameras may look like -- and what he, as someone who works closely on this stuff at Qualcomm -- wants to see more of. While talking about the auto white balance improvements and seeing those enhancements through the viewfinder in real time, Heape admitted that "the industry needs to drive toward that. What you see is what you get is really important. It gives the photographer confidence ... OEMs need to concentrate on that." Heape was also asked about his "dream application" for Qualcomm's ISP advancements and what he was most excited to see smartphone companies do with it in the next few years -- and I thought his answer was fascinating. As he explained, Heape is interested in "reducing the cost and complexity of the camera system." "I think we can get away with two cameras instead of three in some cases ... which reduces the processing and power ... plus using AI for super resolution and using AI to augment capabilities in lowlight." When asked to look even further ahead about how he'd like to see AI used to further improve the smartphone camera experience compared to what we have today, Heape said he wants to see a world where your camera gets to know you. "Your camera getting to know you, and know what you like, and know the edits you tend to make and the shots you like to take ... basically training your camera. Learning what kind of shots you like and the composition and the camera getting to know you over time and then making those adjustments for you the more images you shoot. I think that's kind of where we need to get to next ... kind of like having the Copilot PC, if you will, for your camera." As someone who's felt pretty unimpressed with existing AI camera tools, I really hope Heape's ideal camera future is the one we're headed toward -- one where AI is working in the background and giving you better photos and videos without you having to think about it. I don't particularly care about (or want) AI features that alter my photos into something they aren't. I want my phone to take the best picture possible without me needing to think about it too much, and talking with Heape, that sounds like the future he wants to see, too. I think we're heading in the right direction Ever since smartphone brands and chip manufacturers started going all in on AI over the last couple of years, I've found it difficult to get truly excited about almost any of it. We've seen cool tech demos and a few cool features here and there, but nothing that I've felt has genuinely changed how we use our phones -- particularly when it comes to the camera. While it remains to be seen just how well the Snapdragon 8 Elite and its new ISP actually perform in the real world -- and whether the camera future Heape describes is the one we're actually headed toward -- I will admit that I'm genuinely curious and hopeful about all of it. I firmly believe that the best use of AI is having it work in the background and allowing you to use your phone as you normally would but making it better. Give me better white balance and video recording any day of the week over wonky image generator tools. It really feels like that's the direction Qualcomm is headed, and if that's the future we can look forward to with smartphone cameras, count me in.

Believe it or not, the Snapdragon 8 Elite might make smartphones exciting again

Unlike with smartphones, explaining why a new chipset is (or isn't) exciting can be pretty difficult. Part of this is baked into these announcements -- at their core, caring about any processor, desktop or otherwise, is deeply nerdy. In the AI era, this task has become even more difficult. Qualcomm, MediaTek, and practically every other SoC maker are focused on providing improved levels of power to LLM developers, all in an effort to move genAI tasks on-device. But until those tools actually ship, it's all a little too hypothetical for the vast majority of consumers to get excited over. ✕ Remove Ads On its face, the Snapdragon 8 Elite -- Qualcomm's new chipset destined to power the vast majority of flagship Android devices over the next 12 months -- falls into that boat. Much of the discussion and demos spread out over the grounds of Snapdragon Summit in Maui are focused on showcasing AI pet photography, or video object removal, or, to the amusement of many tech reporters yesterday, the ability to quickly split a check with a voice command. Flights and accommodations for this launch event were provided by Qualcomm, but the views within this article represent the author's own independent opinion. ✕ Remove Ads But after sitting down with Chris Patrick, SVP and General Manager of Mobile Handsets, for our annual chat, I'm starting to believe the real story of the Snapdragon 8 Elite has little to do with AI. Instead, I think we could be on the verge of some actual excitement in the hardware space, including, potentially, the return of some long-abandoned concepts. It's going to take some real bravery on the part of Qualcomm's hardware partners to get us there, though -- let me explain. Related Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite wants to turn your Android phone into a mobile powerhouse Oryon is coming to Android 4 Oryon is the story behind the Snapdragon 8 Elite And you'll want to pay attention ✕ Remove Ads Considering the ever-present focus on AI this year, I was as surprised as anyone when the conversation between myself, Chris Patrick, and a small group of fellow reporters stayed almost entirely focused on the arrival of Oryon. We've known Oryon was coming to mobile Snapdragon chips for quite some time, and after a successful launch on laptops earlier this year, we're finally seeing a similar level of power arrive on Android. If you're not at least a little curious what these next-gen devices could be capable of, I think Patrick's elevator pitch does a pretty good job: "Desktop class performance, mobile class efficiency." In between the promises for on-device AI to revolutionize mobile, Qualcomm sees the Snapdragon 8 Elite as a breakthrough in performance, combining the raw horsepower we've been waiting to come to smartphones with the efficiency we refuse to give up. And, in fact, the shift to custom cores rather than using off-the-shelf Cortex cores from ARM comes from the desire to meet that reality as soon as possible (and, perhaps, a continuing feud with ARM that heated up after our conversation ended). ✕ Remove Ads "There are still things you don't do with your phone," he tells me. "'I'm gonna wait to do that on my laptop.' Now you're not gonna wait, not anymore. [...] You're going to be confident doing [content creation] on your phone because of the horsepower available." As someone who uses a lot of phones throughout the year to do practically identical tasks, it's an impressive promise -- albeit one that may take some time and work from external developers to prove out. But this is the first time in a long time where I've heard anyone involved this deeply within the smartphone industry explain a potential revolution not based on automating tasks or an ever-increasing amount of tokens. Instead, this feels like a possibility of real, tangential changes. ✕ Remove Ads On a technical level, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is all about flexibility, he tells me, completely eliminating the need to keep those low-power efficiency cores around. "We don't want to have to, for example, as a workload scales, move the workload between processes if you don't have to," he explains. "Because that context switch overhead is part of what slows down the experience for an end user. So if we can have it stay on just that core scale, that's the best for the end user. But the magic trick is, can you have a processor that can scale up and scale down to the bottom?" Obviously, until we can get our hands on an actual next-gen smartphone, these claims remain just that -- claims. There's nothing wrong with retaining some level of skepticism around this sort of redesigned architecture. While TSMC's second-gen 3nm process is capable of delivering the combination of performance and power that Qualcomm is promising, the leap in clock speeds and the total lack of efficiency cores has me, at the very least, raising a single eyebrow. ✕ Remove Ads Get ready for desktop mode to actually matter And the same thing goes for foldables Okay, okay -- all of that is still, perhaps, a little too technical for broad audiences. But it's those promised leaps in performance that immediately had me dreaming of the return of exciting, experimental gadgets. I'm not just talking about foldables, either, although I think those might play a pretty big role throughout the rest of this decade. Let me take these predictions step-by-step, in terms of what potential dreams might actually become a reality in the coming years. ✕ Remove Ads First, desktop mode is about to get real. Whether you're a die-hard DeX user or biding your time until the Pixel 9 Pro definitely, eventually, maybe gets an upgraded desktop mode, I think we are actually on the brink of your phone being able to power the vast majority of users' workloads. These processors are, on paper, capable of competing with the laptop you're already lugging around in your bag -- why not make it so that your smartphone, in turn, powers your entire desktop setup with just a monitor, a mouse and keyboard, and a couple of cables? As Patrick said, the lines between a "phone task" and a "computer task" are about to become blurrier than ever, and I can't help and get excited about it. And that progress, I think, paves the way for foldables to really attract a broader audience. ✕ Remove Ads My biggest complaint with devices like the OnePlus Open has been struggling to discover exactly what I should use that big display for. But if desktop-class apps start coming to smartphones, and foldable displays continue to increase in size and shape, suddenly a world where full-blown Adobe Lightroom slides right into my pocket when I'm boarding a plane or working out of a hotel seems feasible. Obviously, that requires companies like Adobe willing to put the work in on porting desktop-class apps to mobile, and considering Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops are still emulating Creative Cloud tools, we have a way to go. But I think the demand -- the hunger -- for this sort of powerful, portable experience is real, and I think it expands well beyond the foldable form factors you can buy right now. Related Google is working on a new desktop mode for Android -- but what for? Our phones aren't replacing our computers just yet 15 ✕ Remove Ads It's time to rethink how we use our smartphones And OEMs should start by bringing back retired concepts Both of those predictions, I think, are reasonable, but neither are my dream scenarios. I'm not a betting man, and I don't expect companies like Samsung to break tradition in rolling out slow, iterative updates to existing product lines. However, I can't help and feel like we could be on the brink of a new push for rethinking how your smartphone can transform into different shapes and sizes. Beyond foldables, I'm thinking back to Asus's PadFone line, which died a quiet death around a decade ago after releasing just a few distinct models. ✕ Remove Ads PadFone was pretty ingenuous on paper. Why deal with multiple devices when your Android phone can plug into a tablet-sized display, retaining all of your apps, files, and accounts while allowing for a much larger workspace. But we're talking about tech from a decade-plus ago, and the raw horsepower needed for that to be a usable concept for most people simply did not exist. With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we might finally be there. Close This might be ancient history now, but it could be ready for a comeback. If it's a combination of technical limitations and fear of change that have kept us from entering into a single-device world, I think the former wall has finally crumbled. I'm hoping that some OEM is willing to make my dreams a reality. Whether it be Samsung taking another brave step forward after bringing foldables to market, or a smaller OEM like OnePlus gambling on a creative path forward for its performance-driven lineup. Who knows -- maybe it'll be Asus returning to the PadFone concept after letting it rest for an entire decade. ✕ Remove Ads Either way, I think we're primed for the return of one device, multiple form factors. If the performance is real and app developers can begin treating Android like any other desktop-class operating system, why not turn your smartphone into a tablet or laptop? The future of mobile could look different, but only time will tell Obviously, my predictions here remain fiction until someone takes a brave step forward. I think manufacturers need to be convinced of the utility that this level of power can deliver, and that might require an all-new class of desktop-level apps making their way to the Play Store. But if you've long held out hope that your smartphone would, someday, be the key to revolutionizing how and where you work, that path forward seems to finally exist with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. And the best part? No AI hype cycle required. ✕ Remove Ads