Believe the hype: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite will change everything about smartphones

Can you get excited about a microchip? If you’ve never chosen your phone based on the chip inside, that may be worth considering when Snapdragon 8 Elite phones start to arrive. Qualcomm is doing for the next generation of smartphones what it recently did for Windows laptops, and phones that realize its vision will be different from anything we’ve seen before.

Last year, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, a powerful processor that uses the sort of low-power cores normally found in smartphones. The obvious benefit is incredible battery life, since mobile processors are made to sip juice, not gulp. That benefit is now coming to smartphones, and I’m expecting great battery life gains in the next generation. All-day battery life is going to be the rule, not a rarity.

With the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm created an incredibly powerful new chipset that includes its Oryon processing core. The X Elite is truly supercharged. The result was the fastest Windows laptops you could buy, and the first Windows laptops in years that could outperform a premium MacBook Pro.

This year, Qualcomm flew TechRadar to Maui for its Snapdragon Summit, and to check out the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which brings that Oryon core to smartphones. After all the speeches and bluster, I got to actually put the chips to work. Qualcomm provided a reference sample phone for benchmark comparisons – and the results completely blew me away.

I’m not usually a benchmark guy, but… wow!

I don’t let benchmark scores influence my reviews – I rely on my real-world testing and experience –…