Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile SoC during its Summit 2024 event in Maui in October. Shortly after the launch, OnePlus, Xiaomi and Asus released their handsets with the brand-new souped-up chipset. While the new Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered smartphones are hitting the market, leaks about the next-generation Snapdragon chipset have started appearing on the Web. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 SoC is said to offer a 20 percent performance boost over the first-generation model. It could be manufactured on TSMC’s third-generation 3nm process.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 Could Be in The Works
Prominent leaker Digital Chat Station claimed on Weibo that Qualcomm’s unreleased ‘SM8850’ chipset, aka Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, will be manufactured on TSMC’s third-generation 3nm process, dubbed N3P. This would be a notable shift from the second-generation 3nm process (N3E) used on the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
The source further suggests that the frequency of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 chipset will receive a boost and provide a minimum 20 percent performance boost over the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.
Snapdragon 8 Elite
The Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset promises 44 percent improved power efficiency over last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It features an Oryon CPU with a custom eight-core structure with prime cores clocked at 4.32GHz and performance cores with a peak frequency of 3.53GHz. The new chipset is claimed to deliver up to 45 percent improvements in CPU performance and 40 percent boost in GPU performance over Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It is paired with an Adreno GPU and supports up to LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.0 storage.
For connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset has a Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 System with support for Wi-Fi 7 at 6GHz, 5GHz and 2.4GHz spectral bands and Bluetooth 5.4. It features a Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System.
Xiaomi 15 and Xiaomi 15 Pro launched at the end of October in the Chinese market as the first phones to sport Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. Besides Xiaomi, other OEMs including Asus, OnePlus, Realme and iQOO have utilised the chip in their recent handsets.