I interviewed several Qualcomm product managers to figure out why efficiency cores aren't needed to make CPUs more efficient.

It wouldn't be a new chip without AI being crammed in, and Qualcomm has indeed embedded the Snapdragon 8 Elite with its Hexagon NPU. The chip maker claims it is 60 percent better in terms of "AI performance" than the previous generation, but that remains to be seen in real world applications.

Qualcomm has a new chip for flagship phones, and the best part is that it uses an improved version of the Oryon CPU architecture that the Snapdragon X Elite chips brought to Windows PCs earlier this year.