Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 May Come With ‘Significantly Improved’ GPU Performance; Launch Timeline Leaks

Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite as its newest flagship mobile processor at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 in October and the rumour mill suggests that the development of its successor could already be underway. According to a tipster’s recent claims, the next-generation chipset, dubbed Snapdragon 8 Elite 2, could have an accelerated launch timeline. Further, the flagship mobile processor is suggested to come with improvements related to GPU performance courtesy of TSMC’s new fabrication process.

Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 Launch Timeline, Upgrades

In a post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, tipster Digital Chat Station (translated from Chinese) shared details about next year’s flagship Qualcomm mobile chipset. According to the leaker, who has a good track record when it comes to revealing information about unannounced smartphones, the release timeline of Qualcomm’s upcoming SM8850 chipset will be further advanced. While not official, this model is speculated to reference the purported Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 SoC.

Notably, the Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC was launched at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii on October 22, and if the tipster’s claims are to be believed, its successor could debut in early October. In theory, it could give original equipment manufacturers more time to integrate the chipset into their devices.

The chip is tipped to be produced solely using TSMC’s N3P fabrication process and could offer a “significantly improved” GPU performance. It is speculated to be a notable shift from the second-generation 3nm process (N3E), which is used for the development of the Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC.

This claim builds upon previous suggestions by the same tipster that the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 could offer a minimum 20 percent performance boost over the current chipset. It was backed by tipster @Jukanlosreve who also highlighted a 20 percent jump in single-core and multi-core performance, citing sources in South Korea. Notably, Qualcomm already delivered a 30 percent uplift in CPU performance with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, when compared with last year’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.