We’re nearing the tail-end of 2025, which means we’re already about to see the hardware that will power next year’s phones. Now, Qualcomm has just announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and while that name is awful, the chip is actually pretty good.
Qualcomm has just unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the chipset that will power flagship phones throughout 2026—and maybe some phones by the end of this year. The chip is built in a 3nm process technology, and it features a completely redesigned core compute complex. It features a 3rd Gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which the company claims delivers a 20% performance boost over its predecessor. The CPU architecture consists of two Prime cores clocked at up to 4.6GHz and six additional Performance cores running at up to 3.62GHz. This is, too, paired with a new Qualcomm Adreno GPU architecture that promises a 23% uplift in graphics performance and supports features like real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing, specifically optimized for Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen and Nanite technologies.
The chip itself is enough of a generational upgrade that not only is it considerably better than this year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, but it’s apparently even better than the just-released Apple A19 Pro chip, which powers the new iPhone 17 Pro. In our testing, Qualcomm’s test phone powered by this chip scored 3824 in single-core and 12396 in multi-core on Geekbench 6. The single-core score is about 200 points higher than what the A19 Pro scores on average, and the multi-core score is significantly higher, about 3,000 points higher. Apple tends to be ahead at least when it comes to single-core, so Qualcomm beating Apple in single-core performance is significant. Huge things happening here.
If you take a lot of photos and videos, this chip is a huge leap as well. The chipset introduces the world’s first mobile support for the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, which tries to bring studio-grade video recording and post-production control to smartphones. The Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) has been upgraded to a triple 20-bit AI-ISP configuration. This allows for advanced real-time video processing, including semantic segmentation and skin/sky tone adjustments in 4K at 60 FPS. The system supports video capture in 4K at 120 FPS and 8K HDR at 60 FPS, alongside robust support for various HDR formats like Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and Google’s Ultra HDR for photos.
It’s also an important jump for on-device AI, especially as that becomes increasingly more popular among Android phones. The Qualcomm AI Engine, powered by an upgraded Hexagon NPU, boasts a 37% performance improvement for machine learning tasks. Qualcomm is mainly positioning this for agentic AI, where personalized digital assistants can perform complex, context-aware actions across multiple apps without relying on the cloud. The architecture supports a wide range of data precisions (from INT2 to FP16) and features a Fused AI accelerator design to handle multimodal AI models that process information in real-time. A new dual-micro NPU within the Qualcomm Sensing Hub is dedicated to continuously processing audio, voice, and sensor data to build personalized user knowledge graphs, all while keeping user data securely on the device.
This chip will be powering a lot of different flagship smartphones next year, so keep an eye on announcements from companies like Samsung and OnePlus.
Source: Qualcomm
