After appearing in multiple leaks, Qualcomm has officially unveiled its answer to the Dimensity 9400, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Qualcomm is dropping the Gen branding in exchange for a more streamlined name that matches its Snapdragon X PC chips.

Just like the Snapdragon X chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite now uses Qualcomm’s new Oryon CPU cores with a 2/6 layout. The two Prime Cores have a maximum clock speed of 4.32Ghz, while the six Performance Cores run at up to 3.53Ghz. It seems that Qualcomm is going for a similar route with the Dimensity 9400 where there are no efficiency cores to be found. To support that CPU layout, the Snapdragon 8 Elite gets 24MB of L2 cache and support for 5300Mhz LPDDR5X RAM.

Like Apple’s M3 and M4 chips and the Dimensity 9400, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is made using TSMC’s 3nm process, and Qualcomm promises a whopping 45% boost in CPU performance and 44% better power efficiency over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The revamped Adreno GPU, which now runs at 1.1Ghz and comprises of three GPU slices, promises 40% better performance and 40% better power savings.

What will benefit all those claimed performance gains? Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be the first of its kind to support Unreal Engine 5.3 and the Nanite virtualized geometry system, which means that we expect it to run AAA games similar to what Apple has been showcasing since the iPhone 15 Pro series. That sounds nice on paper, but Qualcomm has to figure out how to make AAA mobile games profitable.

Of course, we can’t forget about AI, and the new Hexagon NPU claims to offer up to 45% better performance in running AI tasks, along with support for multimodal Gen AI support. The updated ISP integrates nicely with the new NPU, so expect better HDR performance more natural-looking skin tone, sky colors, and improved autofocus performance on phones using the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

While 6G is far from being official, the Snapdragon X80 5G model offers a peak download speed of 10Gbps and peak upload speeds of up to 3.5Gbps thanks to 6x downlink carrier aggregation and AI-based mmWave range extension. You also get a new FastConnect 7900 system that integrates WiFi 7, UWB, and Bluetooth 5.4 all in a single 6nm chip.