Qualcomm's self-developed CPU is updated, Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition is released

Latest update time：2024-10-22

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Today, the annual Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit was held in Maui, Hawaii. As a grand event in the technology industry, Qualcomm has disclosed the company's latest flagship chip platforms, applications and cooperation at this summit in the past few years. In the past nine years, Qualcomm has also brought technology hotspots and product displays such as 5G, XR, PC and automobiles to this event.

Among them, the self-developed Oryon CPU is undoubtedly one of the hot topics of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in the past two years. In my opinion, this is a product that combines Qualcomm's past experience in Arm CPU and the experience gained from the acquisition of Nuvia. Last year, the first generation of this series of CPUs was officially announced to be used on Qualcomm's PC chip platform Snapdragon X Elite.

On the first day of this year's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm brought the second-generation Oryon CPU and integrated it into the company's latest "Snapdragon 8 Elite" built using TSMC's second-generation 3nm process. It is worth mentioning that this is the first time that the company has integrated its own Oryon CPU on a mobile platform.

A desktop-class CPU

In the past period of time, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm have made a lot of announcements and comparisons around CPUs. Ultimately, it is because of the release of Apple's M series chips and Qualcomm's strong entry, which has led to competition over PC chip efficiency, power consumption and performance.

As a manufacturer that has been deeply involved in the Arm PC market for many years, Qualcomm, which owns the Oryon CPU, has a lot of confidence in the face of these old PC giants. Especially after the release of the second generation, Qualcomm Oryon has performed amazingly. As shown in the figure below, compared with the first generation product, Qualcomm's second-generation Oryon CPU has made significant improvements in both performance and power consumption.

Qualcomm even said that its second-generation Oryon cores in smartphones are faster than Intel's highly anticipated Lunar Lake PC processors.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the new Oryon core is 62 percent faster than the Core Ultra 7 Series 2 chip if both chips run at the same power. If both chips run at the same power, the Core Ultra will require 190 percent of the power of the Qualcomm chip.

In order to cope with the high-performance requirements brought by AI, Qualcomm introduced the new generation of Oryon CPU into the company's newly launched Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition mobile platform. It will replace the Kryo CPU previously used by Qualcomm in mobile chipsets. However, unlike the CPU configuration of Snapdragon X elite, Qualcomm has improved the characteristics of the mobile platform to make it more in line with the pursuit of terminal power consumption and performance.

Specifically for the Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition, its Oryon CPU uses a design of two main cores (prime) and six performance cores (performance). This is also different from the "1+5+2" design of the previous generation flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Among them, the frequency of the main core is 4.21Ghz, and the main frequency of the performance core is 3.53Ghz. Qualcomm also provides this CPU with sufficiently competitive L1 cache (each Prime core has 192KB, each Performance core has 128KB) and L2 cache (each cluster has 12MB of L2 cache pool), which makes it easy to handle various applications.

According to reports, this is a brand-new microarchitecture with an "instant wake" function that reduces frequent power cycles of each core. According to Qualcomm, in the past, the power-up sequence involved resetting the code to prepare the core for operation. Qualcomm eliminated the sequence by using hardware that allows the core to execute the next instruction immediately, further improving its efficiency.

Qualcomm summarized on its website that the company's first mobile version of Qualcomm Oryon CPU has a 45% performance improvement, a 44% improvement in energy efficiency, and the largest shared data cache in the mobile industry. Its overall energy saving effect has increased by 27%, which means that mobile gaming time can be extended by up to 2.5 hours.

An SoC integrating more than 40 components

As mentioned above, Qualcomm has integrated the industry-leading second-generation Oryon CPU into the new Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition. But in addition, the company has also integrated new components such as Modem, GPU, NPU and ISP into this new mobile platform. According to Qualcomm, the company has integrated more than 40 components into this new mobile platform, making it a highly competitive and highly integrated SoC.

As shown in the figure below, in addition to the main components mentioned above, Qualcomm has also integrated components including power management, wireless, audio, fingerprint and RF in the Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition, which will further simplify the design of developers.

Of course, like every previous generation of Snapdragon flagship, upgrades in GPU, NPU, ISP and Modem are the top priorities of Qualcomm's flagship iterations.

First of all, let's look at the GPU. In the new flagship, Qualcomm has integrated an unnamed new generation Adreno GPU. According to reports, the new Adreno GPU uses a unique slice architecture, which divides the shader cores and other fixed function blocks into different slices. This design allows for more dynamic resource allocation, higher clock speeds, better load balancing, and possible reduction in power consumption by turning off slices. Qualcomm pointed out that compared with the previous generation, the new GPU has a 40% performance improvement, a 40% improvement in energy efficiency, and a 35% improvement in ray tracing performance.

As shown in the picture, each part of the slice runs at a clock speed of 1.10GHz. Each slice has its own dedicated memory (the new GPU has 12MB of dedicated memory, reducing the call to RAM), which means smoother performance, longer battery life, sharper graphics and more realistic 3D environments.

Qualcomm also said that the GPU supports Unreal Engine 5.3 and Unreal Chaos Physics Engine, HDR games (10-bit color and Rec.2020), OpenGL ES 3.2 and Vulkan 1.3, and hardware-accelerated H.265, VP9 and AV1 decoding, which provides more support for improving the gaming experience.

When it comes to NPU, Qualcomm has also made new updates to meet AI needs.

As shown in the figure, the new Hexagon NPU has a 6-core vector accelerator, an 8-core scalar and a Tensor accelerator for different AI needs, combined with faster memory throughput, which helps the 8 Elite achieve up to 45% NPU performance improvement (depending on the workload). The upgraded NPU also achieves 45% AI performance/watt power savings (this also depends on what is running). On the unnamed LLM, Qualcomm's NPU can achieve performance of up to 70 tokens per second.

The AI ISP introduced for the first time is another highlight of Qualcomm's new flagship. According to foreign media, to some extent, Qualcomm has completely rebuilt this ISP. It is reported that with the new AI ISP, more processing pipelines now run in the RAW domain, which means that when the ISP automatically corrects white balance, exposure, etc., high-quality results can be obtained.

In addition, on this new flagship chip, Qualcomm has also made architectural adjustments to the NPU and ISP, connecting the two with a technology called Hexagon Direct Link. By integrating the NPU with the imaging pipeline, the device can automatically enhance anything in the picture, including color balance, clarity, and brightness. Qualcomm also revealed that direct RAW processing and direct links to the NPU allow real-time AI enhancement at 4K/60fps, more options for retouching photos through newer and faster image segmentation technology (Insight AI), and 30fps video object removal, all running on the device. It is worth mentioning that this ISP now supports triple 48MP cameras, which can meet some fairly common settings, and can read 30fps 4K video from all three sensors at the same time.

As for wireless, the leading position of X80 modem and WiFi/Bluetooth also makes this flagship chip a hexagonal warrior.

According to reports, the X80 is a complete 5G modem-to-antenna module packaged on a single chip with six antennas for smartphones, 6x carrier aggregation, and an AI-based millimeter wave range extender. Its tensor accelerator dedicated to AI can increase data speeds, reduce latency, and improve coverage and positioning accuracy at lower power; FastConnect 7900 integrates Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband into a single chip to provide end users with solutions such as digital keys, object positioning, and indoor navigation. AI tracks performance and adjusts as needed to maintain the best connection.

Qualcomm says that by combining sub-6GHz and mmWave, 5G can reach download speeds of up to 10Gbps and upload speeds of up to 3.5Gbps. It can also provide 30% better positioning accuracy even inside concrete buildings. Thanks to tri-band spectrum support (2.4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz), phones using this chip should be able to use Wi-Fi at 40% of the power consumption and achieve download speeds of up to 5.8Gbps.

It is these leading configurations that have made Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition highly recognized by customers.

According to Qualcomm, leading OEMs and smartphone brands such as ASUS, Honor, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, Red Magic, Redmi, realme, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE will release terminals equipped with Snapdragon 8 Extreme Edition in the coming weeks.

In Qualcomm's view, the platform will also usher in a new era of generative AI on the terminal side, designed to seamlessly handle the complexity of multimodal AI.

END

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