Qualcomm’s new top chip for smartphones is an evolution of the latest CPUs found in PCs today.

This year, Qualcomm wowed us with its Snapdragon X ARM chips in Windows 11 laptops. The chip is extremely economical and powerful, or even better than AMD and Intel equivalents. Both the Snapdragon X Elite and the X Plus were a hit. Now it’s bringing the technology behind these chips to smartphones.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite will be in many top smartphones at the end of 2024 and in 2025. The chip uses second-generation “Oryon” CPU cores, an evolution of the cores found in Snapdragon X laptop chips today.

According to Qualcomm, the new Oryon cores use up to 44 percent less power while delivering 45 percent more multi-core performance compared to previous Snapdragon 8 chips. TSMC is the chip manufacturer. Qualcomm uses the 3nm process.

The most important improvement is the addition of so-called “Prime” cores, which can operate at a higher clock speed (4.32 GHz versus 3.53 GHz). You can see the CPU distribution chart here:

For comparison: the current Snapdragon X Elite chips in Copilot+ PCs have three clusters with four CPU cores, all running at 3.8 GHz. It is unclear whether the new “Prime” cores will be included in the next generation of Snapdragon X chips.

GPU and NPU

In addition to significantly improved CPU performance, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite also promises a faster GPU that delivers up to 40 percent more performance than previous Snapdragon 8 mobile chips. The NPU receives a speed boost of 45 percent.

This NPU was demonstrated during the presentation while working on various local LLMs running on a smartphone.

Qualcomm concluded its presentation with a big claim: the Snapdragon 8 Elite is faster than the latest Intel Lunar Lake chips. And that for a smartphone chip. It goes without saying that Qualcomm is happy to flex its muscles, but we can’t deny that the current Oryon cores are a slam dunk and finally make Windows 11 on ARM viable.

Qualcomm says many smartphone manufacturers, including Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo and Xiaomi, are on board. Wait until the first devices are available to test Qualcomm’s strong claims in practice.