The battle for smartphone processing power continues—not too long after MediaTek unveiled its new Dimensity 9500 chip for smartphones, Qualcomm officially announced its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at its annual Snapdragon Summit this week. Describing it as the “world’s fastest mobile system-on-a-chip,” Qualcomm says that the new platform is set to power several upcoming Android flagships starting in the coming days and weeks.
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A 3nm chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is built to handle newer AI-based software features, as is the norm with most processors these days. Inside you’ll find a 3rd Generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which sees an increase of up to 20% in performance while simultaneously achieving a gain of up to 35% in CPU power efficiency, contributing to a 16% overall SoC power savings. This is of course based on Qualcomm’s own testing, so it would be interesting to see how it performs in real-world usage.
Building on its AI capabilities, the 8 Elite Gen 5 also comes with an upgraded Qualcomm Hexagon NPU that’s 37% faster, along with 16% better performance per watt; Qualcomm says that this performance allows that chip to run “Agentic AI” features, which are designed to learn from a user’s behaviour and routines in real-time to act proactively with personalized recommendations across different apps.
For games, there’s a built-in Adreno GPU that Qualcomm claims has a 23% increase in overall performance, with a 20% reduction in power consumption, in addition to support for new gaming such as Tile Memory Heap and Mesh Shading for better performance.
For imaging, Qualcomm says that the chip is capable of powering professional-grade imaging features, such as support for Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec which allows for “near-lossless” video capture and greater flexibility for post-production editing. In terms of photography, the camera system uses on-device AI for context-aware features like auto-focus, auto-exposure, and auto-white balance, which again should be something to look forward to especially with most smartphone manufacturers working on integrating more advanced imaging hardware into newer devices.
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The 8 Elite Gen 5 also comes with Snapdragon Audio Sense, which supports features like wind-noise rejection and HDR audio to the microphone system. Connectivity is handled by Qualcomm’s X85 5G Modem-RF System with speeds of up to 12.5Gbps, and the FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System with Wi-Fi 7 technology. We can expect to see the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in several upcoming devices from brands including Xiaomi, Samsung, and OnePlus.
