Now that the iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro chip has taken center stage as the new hotness in phone silicon, Qualcomm is trying to make the claim that Android phones can be used for more than flicking through your social feeds with zombie-like efficiency. In comes the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a confusing name for a chip with a one-track mind: pushing better graphics and multitasking capabilities.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the sequel to Qualcomm’s last-gen flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. You know what? Why not just ignore the name for now, especially if you’re skimming these specs? The new CPU on a 3nm process promises to be one of the fastest, with two “prime cores” hitting a new blistering clock speed of 4.6GHz. The Snapdragon 8 Elite managed to hit above 4GHz last year. Clock speeds never tell the whole story. The chip also houses six “performance” cores that go up to 3.6GHz. Devices with the Elite Gen 5 should be more power-efficient than before, so maybe you’ll be able to work or game on your phone without throwing battery life out the window.
The Elite 8 Gen 5 chip is pushing gaming and video harder than ever on Android devices. The new chip supports the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, which is used by professional videographers in post-production. Most regular users won’t go beyond a device’s default editing suite before putting their content up on Instagram or TikTok. Even if the “shot on iPhone” slogan is a gimmick, Qualcomm could have a chip that would at least let you modify video to some professional standard.
Gaming without destroying battery life
I can’t help wondering how much longer I need to wait before our pocketable supercomputers are truly as capable as using a Mac or PC. The Adreno GPU, or graphics processing unit, in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 promises 1.2GHz clock speed with a 23% jump in performance over the 8 Elite, which was already pretty damn good at gaming tasks. Adding to this is the dedicated memory cache called High Performance Memory. This should reduce latency and improve battery life for gaming or graphics.
The other big upgrade this year is Snapdragon Audio Sense. This is a form of on-chip microphone technology for better noise cancellation and HDR audio. Qualcomm implied this will mean the mic in new phones will be good enough that you won’t need to reach for a lavalier or DJI Mic when you really need to set up a quick podcasting session. We’ll have to judge for ourselves how good this is, but if Qualcomm wants your phone to be your one-stop shop for video editing as well, a good microphone would especially come in handy.
Qualcomm’s new flagship chips will hit all the expected features, from mmWave 5G and Wi-Fi 7 to external display support that includes 4K at 120Hz refresh rates. Let’s also get the other well-expected element out of the way. The Hexagon NPU, or neural processing unit, allows for computationally intensive tasks without having to overload the GPU. The new Hexagon NPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is supposedly 37% faster with more AI accelerators. Whether or not the next phones will legitimately make use of faster AI processing will be up to Samsung, OnePlus, Asus ROG, and other device makers.
You’ll keep hearing the word “agentic,” like it’s some sort of magic spell that will transform your phone into a talking familiar. Samsung has largely been relying on Google’s Gemini AI suite in its Galaxy lineup, though the so-called Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S24 features include some live translation capabilities on calls. We expect Samsung will add some of Google’s Pixel 10 features, such as Magic Cue.
This isn’t a “fifth-gen” chip
Despite the name, the new chip isn’t the fifth “Elite”-level chip. Though it’s a continuation of the Snapdragon Gen 8 line, it’s the third in the series using the company’s Oryon microarchitecture. Qualcomm’s new naming conventions are giving me “Dell Premium Pro Max Plus” vibes, mostly due to how the company’s marketing chief, Don McGuire, had to come out early to explain how utterly unconfusing the name is… so long as you turn your brain off.
“Gen 5 isn’t just a number. It’s a signal that this platform leads the family forward,” McGuire wrote. If you have to write a separate post just to explain a name, it proves the opposite; sequential numbers are far easier to parse than empty marketing gimmicks. The question of its power compared to the iPhone Air and 17 Pro/Pro Max’s A19 Pro chip is going to be far more important than a name, anyway.