Qualcomm unveils the chip that will power many of 2025’s best phones

The stage for the 2025 mobile chipset wars has been set.

Just weeks after MediaTek unveiled its flagship Dimensity 9400, big rival Qualcomm has unveiled its response in the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

If the name doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because Qualcomm has rebranded its most powerful mobile chip this year, borrowing the ‘Elite’ branding from its laptop chipset. But make no mistake, this is a direct follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

But what else is new this year, and what can we expect Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered Android phones to bring to the table? As it turns out, quite a lot.

When did the Snapdragon 8 Elite launch?

Qualcomm officially revealed the Snapdragon 8 Elite at its Snapdragon Summit event on 21 October 2024.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

It continues the company’s tradition of launching a new generation towards the end of each calendar year:

Of course, the more relevant date is when you’ll be able to get your hands on the first devices that use it. For now, Qualcomm has only said that this will take place “in the coming weeks”.

Which phones will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite?

So far, Qualcomm has only confirmed that the following companies are “poised to launch devices” powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Based on the latest rumours and previous generations, we’ve added the most likely models to the list:

• Asus – Zenfone 11 or ROG Phone 9 Pro
• Honor – Magic 7 series
• iQoo – 13
• OnePlus – 13
• Oppo – Find X8 Ultra
• Realme – GT 7 Pro
• Samsung – Galaxy S25 series
• Vivo – X200 Pro+

However, leaker Yogesh Brar thinks the Xiaomi 15 and 15 Pro will be the first:

However, you can expect plenty more devices to be released throughout 2025. Essentially, the successor to any current phone that uses the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is likely to shift to the 8 Elite.

What are the Snapdragon 8 Elite specs and features?

Qualcomm describes the Snapdragon 8 Elite as “the most powerful and world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever”. That’s based on internal benchmarks, but judging by specs, there’s no reason to doubt its claims.

The 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite will be responsible for dozens of different tasks on the phone, but is focused on five main ones: performance, power efficiency, generative AI, gaming and photography.

On the CPU side, the chipset uses the second generation of Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU. It includes two ‘Prime’ cores dedicated to top-tier performance, which Qualcomm claims are the world’s fastest mobile CPUs, with maximum clock speeds of 4.32GHz.

These speeds are achieved without compromising efficiency. In fact, the new architecture is supposedly up to 46% more power efficient than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

That’s despite all six of the other CPU cores being focused on performance – two of these were efficiency cores on the 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm says this is the best combination of performance and power efficiency, which should mean battery life is at least as good as it was before.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

The performance cores can supposedly reach clock speeds of up to 3.53GHz, meaning they should be able to run even the most demanding apps without issue.

That CPU works in tandem with Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, which features a sliced architecture for the first time. Compared to the 8 Gen 3, this supposedly offers 40% faster performance, 40% power savings and 35% improved ray tracing performance while gaming.

The 8 Elite is also the first mobile chipset to support Unreal Engine 5.3 with Nanite, which enables more realistic 3D gaming environments. It works alongside the Unreal Chaos Physics Engine and should offer more life-like object interactions while in-game.

As you might expect in 2024, AI is also a core component of the Snapdragon 8 Elite. A key advancement is support for multimodal generative AI – essentially, adding the options for sound, vision (works just by pointing your camera at something) and video to existing text, voice and photo inputs.

In theory, this will make any task where you might use AI simpler and more seamless. And as it’s all on device rather than in the cloud, it means privacy isn’t compromised at all.

Another key use of artificial intelligence is for photos and videos. Alongside the CPU and GPU is a dedicated Hexagon NPU, which is getting better at recognising objects you capture with your phone and optimising them accordingly – including low-light scenes.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Qualcomm

The 8 Elite is also capable of segmenting an image into over 250 layers, allowing you to select a very specific part of any photo and adjust it to your liking. That’s much more granular than we’ve been able to do up until this point.

Elsewhere, the new Video Object Eraser lets you remove elements from a video and realistically replace the gap using generative AI. This is a feature that’s been available for photos for a while, but we’ve not seen it on videos before.

And in less-than-ideal conditions, real-time relighting can add a virtual movable light source to ensure you stay well-lit during photos. This can be adjusted manually, or automatically using AI.

Of course, not all these features will be available on every Snapdragon 8 Elite device. But it’s an impressive feature set that means the chipset is well future-proofed.