Qualcomm today unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which features a next-generation custom Qualcomm-designed Oryon CPU instead of the semi-custom Kryo Arm-based chips from prior SoCs. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features the "world's fastest mobile CPU," outperforming even the A18 Pro chip in the iPhone 16 Pro series.
The Oryon CPU is built on a 3-nanometer process, much like Apple's most recent chips. It has eight cores in total, including two prime cores and six performance cores, and it is able to reach peak CPU speeds of 4.32 GHz. Qualcomm also claims that it has the "industry's largest shared cache" to enable "insanely fast data retrieval." There's also a new "Adreno" GPU, and Qualcomm says it uses a "revolutionary sliced architecture" for faster performance and battery life optimizations.
Qualcomm built the chip with generative AI in mind, and it has an included Qualcomm AI Engine with Multimodal Gen AI that Qualcomm says can better understand voice, text, and images, viewing the world through the camera on a smartphone to help with tasks.
Compared to prior-generation Qualcomm chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite features 45 percent faster CPU performance and 44 percent better power efficiency.
The chip integrates the Qualcomm Snapdragon X80 5G modem with Wi-Fi 7 and 5G support. It will be used in Android-based devices from companies like Google, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and more.
Monday October 21, 2024 1:44 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple is expected to release iOS 18.1 on Monday, October 28, bringing the first set of Apple Intelligence features to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 models. This update marks the first significant step forward in Apple's AI integration, offering a new Siri contextually-aware experience and a range of additional capabilities powered by on-device machine learning and large language models. There are a ...
Monday October 21, 2024 8:21 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
The Wall Street Journal's Ben Cohen this summer interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook about the Vision Pro, innovation, Apple Intelligence, and more. Image Credit: Vanity Fair Cook admitted that the Vision Pro headset is not a mass-market product due to its high price. "At $3,500, it's not a mass-market product," said Cook. "Right now, it's an early-adopter product. People who want to have...
Thursday October 17, 2024 4:06 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro users have been experiencing excessive and unexplainable battery drain, according to complaints on Reddit, the Apple Support Communities, and the MacRumors forums. While many of the reports are from iPhone 16 users, older iPhones running iOS 18 may also be experiencing battery life issues. There is a long-running iOS 18 battery life complaint thread on MacRumo...
Friday October 18, 2024 2:16 pm PDT by Juli Clover
There appears to be a bug with some iPhone 16 models that is causing random restarts, according to complaints on Reddit, the MacRumors forums, and the Apple Support Communities. Affected users are seeing their iPhones freeze unexpectedly and then reboot. Reports about the issue have been ongoing since the iPhone 16 models first launched in September, and have continued to this week. The iOS...
The first of a number of imminent Apple product updates arrived this week with the seventh-generation iPad mini, but what else is still in store and when can we expect to see them? On the software side, the public release of iOS 18.1 and related updates with the first Apple Intelligence features is drawing ever closer, and we can expect more of those features to arrive with iOS 18.2 before...
Apple will release iOS 18.1 next week, introducing a suite of advanced hearing health capabilities to the AirPods Pro 2 and the first Apple Intelligence features. The timing of the update was confirmed by reviewers who were given early access to the AirPods Pro 2's new hearing health features, which are now known to be included in the update. The update will include three core features:...
Friday October 18, 2024 1:45 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Apple often releases new Macs in the fall, but we are still waiting for official confirmation that the company has similar plans this year. We're well into October now, and if Apple plans to announce new Macs before the holidays, recent history suggests it will happen this month. Here's what we know so far. It's been 225+ days since Apple released a new Mac, the last being M3 versions of the ...
Friday October 18, 2024 12:45 pm PDT by Juli Clover
One of the main complaints about the prior-generation iPad mini 6 was "jelly scrolling" or screen tearing, and it sounds like it's a problem that Apple may have addressed with hardware updates to the iPad mini 7 display. In the most recent episode of the Six Colors Podcast, Jason Snell and Dan Moren discussed the new iPad mini 7, and shared some information about the display. Snell said that ...
Friday October 18, 2024 11:26 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
In recent months, several credible sources have claimed that Apple plans to release a redesigned, significantly thinner iPhone 17 model next year. The device's name is not yet known, so we are referring to it as the "iPhone 17 Air" for now. There have been conflicting rumors about the design and specifications for the device, but most sources have agreed that it will have around a 6.6-inch...
And a 45% increase over the previous generation would put this at least in striking distance of the Geekbench scores of Apple’s mobile CPUs.
There are two kind of mind-blowing aspects to this, though:
One is a 45% jump in performance. In this era Of CPU development, that’s absolutely massive, and extremely rare unless either your previous design kind of sucked, or your new one is revolutionary.
The other is that it took until this chip, with a 45% jump in performance, to even get close to where Apple is. The core performance of the A series vs Qualcomm’s was, until this generation, staggeringly unbalanced. As in, three-year-old Apple CPUs were directly competitive with Qualcomm’s top of the line.
Is the claim 'fastest clock speed' or 'fastest when we put eleventy billion cores against one Apple core'?
Their footnote says compared to a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and a 45% ST improvement would put them at 3,101. A18 Pro is 3350ish. That's wouldn't be the fastest so it sounds like more Qualcomm bullcrap.
Multithread would be about 9,690 compared to 8,080ish, but that's with eight cores to six...so again, not an even comparison, but not a surprise from Qualcomm.
And their launch partners are mostly known benchmark cheaters, so I hope the testers take that into account.
If all of this is true, we knew it was a matter of time that the competition would catch up. Even Intel is making great strides with moving x86 closer to ARM (although they're still quite a ways off). Apple Silicon truly revolutionized the industry, and Apple should get a lot of credit for it. Although I'm quite critical of Apple in a lot of aspects, the M3 15" MacBook Air is the best laptop I've ever owned, and in my opinion the best laptop ever built.
The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro are Apple's newest iPhones and follow last year's iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, but how different are the two latest models, and what exactly does a "Pro" device offer?
