Linus Tech Tips Discussion

 Snapdragon Summit 2025 - Snapdragon 8 Elite and Snapdragon X2 Elite Announced Summary Yesterday, Qualcomm held their annual "Snapdragon Summit" event. As usual, they announced their a bunch of new hardware products as well as some software features. The two biggest announcements are the new Snapdragon chips for laptops (Snapdragon X2 Elite) and phones (Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5).       Announcements Please keep in mind that all the numbers are first party numbers, and as a result should be taken with a grain of salt.     First up, the new phone chips.   Qualcomm has once again changed their naming scheme so the new processor will be called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It is the successor to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which was the successor to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Qualcomm says this chip is: Quote The World’s Fastest Mobile System-on-a-chip, Establishes New Consumer Experiences and Sets New Industry Benchmarks   So what's new? The CPU cores has been upgraded to the third generation of Oryon cores, Qualcomm's own architecture based on their acquisition of NUVIA. The new cores delivers up to 20% higher single core scores and 17% higher multicore scores. The efficiency has also increased by 35%.  The layout is still a 2+6 design with two Prime cores (boosts up to 4.6GHz) and six performance cores (boosts up to 3.62GHz). The new cores also supports arm's SME instructions, which helps with AI workloads. Although it doesn't support SME2 unlike arm's recently announced C1 cores.   The GPU has also gotten a large upgrade. 23% higher performance, 25% faster in ray tracing workloads. The efficiency has also increased by 20%. Some of these improvements comes from a new 18MB large cache which Qualcomm calls the Adreno High Performance Memory (Adreno HPM). The GPU now also has "full Unreal Engine 5 compatibility", which seems to refer to specifically Nanite, Lumen and mesh shading support.   The NPU gets a 37% speed upgrade, now with 80 TOPS of processing power, with 16% higher performance per watt. It now also support INT2 and FP8.   A new and improved Image Signaling Processor (ISP). It seems like Qualcomm put quite some effort into this one this year. It still supports the same amount of cameras with the same resolutions, but now gains support for the Advanced Professional Video (AVP) codec. It is a "perceptually lossless" video codec hat supports very high chrome subsampling (up to 4:4:4:4) and also up to 16bit depth. It is also design for fast encoding and decoding. It is supported in Android 16, DaVinci Resolve and FFmpeg at the time of writing. It seems like this is a direct response to Apple ProRes. From what I know, this is an open format from the IETF so hopefully we wil