Smartphones will work 2 times better: performance will increase, energy consumption will fall

Compared to the previous generation, the new Snapdragon 8 Elite processor provides a 45 percent increase in performance and a 44 percent improvement in power consumption.

At its recent flagship Snapdragon Summit event, Qualcomm introduced the Oryon processor on its smartphone platform. EE Times reports.

Based on the first-generation Oryon processor, which was first introduced last year with the company's X Elite AI PC chip, the company announced its latest generation of mobile chips for smartphones — Snapdragon 8 Elite.

The new microprocessor uses second-generation Oryon processors with a maximum clock speed of 4.32 GHz, combined with 24 MB of shared CPU cache and 5.3 GHz LPDDR5x memory.

In a departure from its previous naming conventions that would have made it the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, Qualcomm has carried over the “Elite” branding from the X Elite. As was evident from other chipsets announced at the event, Qualcomm uses the “Elite” branding to refer to systems-on-chips powered by its own Oryon processors.

Performance and power consumption are often at odds. Delivering improvements on both fronts is no easy task. For the Oryon processor, this was achieved primarily through a chip microarchitecture consisting of two “main” cores and six “performance” cores.

Typical performance cores are designed for higher computing capabilities, but at the expense of a higher power consumption profile.

Traditionally, while they are more than powerful enough to handle workloads that can support efficiency cores, it doesn't make sense to use them in this way, given the cost of higher power consumption when handling lighter computing tasks.

What sets the Oryon processor apart is that its performance cores are both traditional performance cores and efficiency cores in one. The range in which it can scale in terms of processing and power spans the lower ranges of the efficiency cores.

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However, the microarchitecture design allows it to scale its power consumption and therefore processing performance to handle typical workloads of the performance cores.

The second-generation Oryon processor has six of these performance cores. Combined with two of what Qualcomm calls an even more powerful “Prime” core with clock speeds of up to 4.32GHz, the company is confident that its latest SoC has more than enough power while providing extended battery life for the next generation of AI-powered smartphones.

This was demonstrated again at the event when Qualcomm compared the smartphone chip to its competitors' PC AI SoCs — and based on their numbers, Qualcomm won.

The new processor — is just one of the design elements that Qualcomm hopes will pave the way for agent-based AI in smartphones.

The new technology goes beyond object detection and classification. It also extends to sensing time-of-flight, depth perception, and other information similar to how humans use vision. Depending on the type of image sensor used, this capability can be extended even beyond what humans can perceive, providing information beyond the visible spectrum into the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.

Agent AI is not quite there yet and will require further improvements in generative AI autonomy, complex reasoning, and multi-step problem solving. These improvements will require further development on several fronts, from processing capabilities and memory performance to improved multimodal sensor inputs and advances in fine-tuning AI models.

However, thanks to the capabilities implemented by Qualcomm in the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the first important steps on this evolutionary path have already been taken, and it is only a matter of time before our smartphones truly become personal assistants that not only provide us with information, but can also act on our behalf.