At Snapdragon Summit 2024, Qualcomm unveiled its new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset with the usual marketing cocktail of flashy benchmark scores and bold performance promises (“the GPU is 40% faster” etc...
), but it can be hard to discern how – or indeed if – these on-paper improvements will enhance the real-world experience of Android users. Qualcomm, of course, is acutely aware that good-looking numbers don’t tell the whole story, and the semiconductor giant was happy to elaborate on the tangible benefits of its Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset when posed a question on the matter in a roundtable interview attended by TechRadar. Chris Patrick, SVP of Qualcomm’s Mobile Handset division, began his refreshingly jargon-free answer by referencing the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s gaming-related upgrades: “Gaming is one use case that really pushes a smartphone chipset to its limit [because] it keeps consuming every possible processing resource,” the former engineer explained.
“The difference between playing a game when it's struggling to render the frame, or struggling to process multiple characters on the screen [...
] and the experience we’ve had testing Oryon [the CPU inside the Snapdragon 8 Elite] [is stark]. Those experiences are now effortless. There's no lag.
The device isn't heating up anymore, even at ridiculous levels of detail. So, that's a pretty compelling [upgrade].” “We’ve also talked about web browsing,” Patrick continued.
“In a way, web browsing.