Final Words
In the Android headset space, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chips have been the high-end SoC to beat over the last several years, and with their latest generation of chips, Qualcomm is certainly not slowing down. The company is largely in the driver’s seat in defining what the flagship Android smartphone experience should be, setting the standard for both performance and features. And the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips are once more pushing the envelope on both fronts.
While the Oryon V4 CPU cores look to be a modest improvement overall, the GPU situation is far more significant. With a bigger and more powerful GPU design across the entire family, Qualcomm is promising 35%+ performance improvements for both chips. Meanwhile, the addition of matrix cores to the mobile SoC, even if it is just the Extreme SKU for now, is a welcome addition that should pay some big dividends down the line for both AI performance and gaming performance via improved temporal upscaling.
In fact, AI is unsurprisingly a major element of Qualcomm’s marketing message overall. The company continues to pursue and refine the idea of running increasingly complex AI models locally on smartphones, and the Elite Gen 6 series is the best yet in that regard. The combination of GPU matrix cores and the new transformer-focused element accelerator for the Hexagon NPU means that the Elite Gen 6 is capable of working both harder and smarter when it comes to AI inference.
Of course, Qualcomm’s performance improvements do not just come from architecture improvements, but manufacturing improvements as well. The shift to TSMC’s 2nm GAAFET process is a one-in-a-generation change that brings with it improvements to transistor density and performance that are well ahead of what we have seen in recent generations. The company’s ability to hit 5GHz on their CPU cores comes thanks in part to the high performance of these transistors, as does the 30% energy efficiency improvements they are claiming across multiple aspects of the chip.
But for all of the feature and performance improvements that the Snapdragon Elite Gen 6 family brings to the table, the sharp divergence between the vanilla Elite and the Elite Extreme must not be forgotten. The Elite Extreme is, in short, the true flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite experience; it is the version of the chip not only with the best performance, but also the only version of the chip that brings to bear all of the features that Qualcomm has baked into the SoC. The vanilla Snapdragon Elite Gen 6, by contrast, is no slouch, but the fact that it misses out on the GPU matrix cores, the GPU cache, and VVC video decoding support (among other things) should not be forgotten. Especially as some of these items were features that were in the previous Elite Gen 5 parts, the vanilla Elite is, despite the naming, certainly less elite this time around.
Overall, this week’s reveal of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series has certainly been a statement-making moment for Qualcomm. The company has lofty ambitions for its flagship hardware, and a new stack of architectural and manufacturing technologies to achieve them. Now the only question is how close they will get, a question we will have the answer to in the coming weeks once the first Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 handsets begin shipping.
