From Snapdragon 8 Elite to MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon X Elite: Mobile and laptop processors of 2024

From Snapdragon 8 Elite to MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon X Elite: Mobile and laptop processors of 2024
| Photo Credit: Haider Ali Khan

A processor in a mobile phone or a laptop is what a brain is to human beings. It computes what it sees in a swift manner and gets you a result. Through the course of 2024, many mobile and laptop processors made their appearances in flagship smartphones and premium laptops in India. 

These include Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, MediaTek Dimensity 9300, and affordable 5G processors like Snapdragon 4s Gen 2. The year came to a close with the arrival of MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Qualcomm also pushed itself in the PC domain with the commercial launch of the Snapdragon X Elite processor backed by a dedicated NPU to offer Generative AI features in laptops.

Let’s explore some of the major mobile and laptop processors we saw in 2024.

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MediaTek Dimensity 9300

Vivo X100 Pro and Vivo X100 were among the first smartphones to run the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 mobile processor. The 6nm octa-core processor’s CPU had four super cores and four large cores. It had an Arm Immortalis G720 GPU.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

The most-used processor in premium flagship smartphones of 2024 was Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which was packed in phones like OnePlus 12, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Xiaomi 14, iQOO 12, and even Vivo’s X Fold 3 Pro.

Snapdragon 4s Gen 2

The chipset was introduced for the OEMs to build affordable, sub-10K 5G smartphones in India. The octa core mobile processor had two performance cores at 2 GHz, and six efficiency cores at 1.8 GHz. It offered LPDDR4x RAM, UFS 3.1 storage, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.1 support and also had dual band NavIC for better accuracy. The Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 chipset featured in the Redmi A4 5G and now in the Poco M7 Pro.

MediaTek Dimensity 9400

The 3nm mobile processor arrived towards the end of 2024 in phones like Oppo Find X8 Pro and Vivo’s X200 series. It had 1x 3.63 GHz Cortex-X925, 3x 3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 and 4x 2.4 GHz Cortex-A720. The processor supported UFS 4.0 and LPDDR5X memory along with agentic AI to offer large language support on-device.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite

The company moved away from routine nomenclature and named the successor to the SD 8 Gen 3 as Snapdragon 8 Elite, instead of calling it SD 8 Gen 4. Competing with the Dimensity 9400 mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Elite had 2 x 4.32 GHz Prime Oryon cores and 6x 3.53 GHz Custom Oryon Phoenix M performance cores. It also grows on Gen AI capabilities and thus found its way into the Realme GT 7 Pro and iQOO 13 smartphones.

Snapdragon X Elite

Gen AI features this year attracted laptop makers as well, so they tried novel ways of utilising them by offering a customised AI button on their laptops. Moving ahead, they partnered with Qualcomm to use its Snapdragon X Elite processor with a dedicated NPU to offer native Gen AI features on a PC. The Arm-based processor had Qualcomm Oryon CPU as well, clocked at 3.42 GHz. The processor was seen in Asus Vivobook S 15 and HP’s Elitebook Ultra G1q, as well as in Surface laptops.

Intel Core Ultra 200V series

The Intel Core Ultra 200V series had a major leap in x86 computing efficiency and performance. Featuring Intel’s Xe2 graphics and a new NPU, the Intel Core Ultra 200V series delivered up to 120 TOPS of AI performance and up to 50% more gaming performance. It was evident in laptops like Asus Zenbook 14 OLED and HP OmniBook Ultra Flip.