Existing Qualcomm chips like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can support up to four operating system upgrades and four years of security patches. This has been a goal of Qualcomm to enable manufacturing partners to keep updating older phones for longer.

Qualcomm's top-of-the-line mobile chip is getting a new name. But the newly unveiled Snapdragon 8 Elite offers more than just surface changes as it's built on a 3-nanometer process, features a new CPU and promises plenty of neural processing to handle new on-device AI features.