Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 8 Elite for smartphones, Snapdragon Cockpit and Snapdragon Ride chips for cars: Key details

Qualcomm has announced two Snapdragon platforms: its most powerful mobile platform – Snapdragon 8 Elite for Android mobiles and Snapdragon Cockpit and Snapdragon Ride for automobiles – at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 event in Hawaii. The company also hosted its first ever Snapdragon Summit in India on October 23 where it talked about the new chips.

At the heart of the Snapdragon 8 Elite is Qualcomm's custom Oryon CPU, which the company claims is its fastest mobile processor yet. The chip also features a new Adreno GPU for enhanced graphics rendering, supporting technologies like real-time ray tracing and global illumination for immersive gaming – offering 40% improvement in performance and power efficiency.
In addition to power, the new chip comes with enhanced AI capabilities with the new Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, enabling faster and more efficient on-device AI processing. As per Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite includes support for large multimodal models.
In terms of camera, the Snapdragon 8 Elite enhances photography prowess with an AI-powered image signal processor. Connectivity gets an upgrade with the Snapdragon X80 5G modem that supports Wi-Fi 7 and integrated Ultra-Wideband (UWB) for enhanced proximity features.
The chip comes with support for aptX Lossless audio and spatial audio with head-tracking, and security is enhanced with Truepic technology, which uses cryptography to authenticate photos, videos, and audio, safeguarding against AI manipulation.

Qualcomm also launched the Snapdragon Ride Platform to accelerate the development of advanced automated driving systems for the software-defined vehicles. As per Qualcomm, the platform encompasses everything – from foundational hardware to vehicle control systems, data services and cloud connectivity.

Qualcomm says that Snapdragon Ride supports a full spectrum of automated driving capabilities, from basic driver-assistance features to high-level autonomous systems with 360-degree sensing and precise localisation.
The platform also offers scalable and customisable system-on-chip (SoC) solutions and vision products, allowing automakers and suppliers to tailor solutions to their specific needs, including parking assistance, and driver monitoring.
The chip also gets the Qualcomm AI Engine to accelerate on-device machine learning and computer vision for optimal performance and efficiency.

Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon Cockpit Platform solutions will power the next generation of in-vehicle experiences such as personalisation, convenience and safety.
It supports personalised driver and passenger experiences, including intelligent virtual assistants, natural voice control, and adaptive human-machine interfaces as well as advanced driver-assistance systems, in-cabin monitoring and ultra-HD surround view monitoring for enhanced safety.
The chip also supports smarter navigation with lane-level navigation with precise positioning, multiple high-resolution displays (up to 16 displays) support, including ultra-wide panoramic displays, reconfigurable 3D digital instrument clusters, augmented reality heads-up displays (HUDs), and Ultra HD media streaming.
Snapdragon Cockpit Platforms enable the development of scalable architectures with a unified software framework. Qualcomm has also collaboarted with Google where the latter will leverage Snapdragon Digital Chassis and Google’s in-vehicle technologies to produce a standardised reference framework for development of generative AI-enabled digital cockpits and software-defined vehicles (SDV).