Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which the company says has “the world’s fastest mobile CPU,” a custom version of the second generation Qualcomm Oryon. The platform is purpose-built to power on-device generative AI, “built to handle the complexities of multi-modal AI seamlessly while prioritizing privacy,” per Qualcomm. Smartphone brands and OEMs including Asus, Honor, iQOO, OnePlus, Opposite, RealMe, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi are onboard to launch devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, starting before the end of the year, according to Qualcomm’s announcement.

Qualcomm presented its new flagship mobile chipset this week at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, explaining in a news release that the new system draws on Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, designed for “game changing performance.”

VentureBeat reports that Qualcomm is claiming the Hexagon NPU “has 12 times the performance of the previous generation,” while the Oryon CPU and Adreno GPU each improve over predecessors by three times the performance.

“Overall, the device has more than 40 components embedded in a system-on-chip design, where customers can mix and match the features” they want in their final products, VentureBeat writes, noting its video rendering and streaming abilities make it ideal for gaming.

“It supports Unreal Engine’s Chaos Physics system, running the game physics simulations on device in real time,” per VentureBeat, which adds that the Snapdragon 8 Elite marks the “first time ever” Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite solution will run in real time on a mobile chip, enabling “a massive increase in film-quality environments in mobile games.”

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite website delivers complete specs, including speeds of up to 4.32GHz — “supposedly the fastest in the industry,” writes TechRadar, noting “six new performance cores that each boast peak speeds of 3.53GHz.” It also has a 24MB cache.

Qualcomm’s new system-on-a-chip improves on last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, “the company’s first chip capable of generative AI capabilities,” writes CNET, explaining that “the new chip includes even more AI expertise, such as support for an AI assistant to use the camera to recognize objects in real time, and a new trick that generates lighting so that your artificially well-lit face shows up in videos with bright backgrounds.”

TechRadar points out that the Snapdragon 8 Elite launch comes “just a month after Apple and MediaTek unveiled their latest flagship chipsets — the A18 Pro and Dimensity 9400, respectively.”