Motorola is getting into the system-on-a-chip game. At Verizon's event in New York City today, the Illinois-based manufacturer announced the Motorola X8 Mobile Computing System, which the company is calling an "8-core" chip. It has a dual-core application processor, four graphics cores, a contextual computing core, and another core for "natural language processing." Multiple cores designed for different processes like voice recognition should leave the dual-core processor free to handle traditional tasks from apps and save battery at the same time. The technology also supports functionality like "touchless control," which was announced today. The feature allows users to use voice commands while the phone is in standby, and it's likely that the natural language processing core remains active to handle such tasks. Motorola says the new chip gives the Droid Ultra, Droid Maxx, and Droid Mini 24 percent faster CPU performance and a 100 percent faster GPU.

Update: A Motorola spokesperson at a simultaneous event held in Chicago to announce the new phones tells The Verge that the X8 is a custom-made system-on-a-chip. However, the spokesperson added that company is using Qualcomm Krait CPU cores and Adreno GPU cores in the design. It's possible that the much-rumored Moto X will use this X8 SoC, but we'll need to wait to know for sure. Motorola declined to comment when asked who is manufacturing the chips.

Update 2: The Motorola X8 will indeed appear in the Moto X, too.