Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. It features the Qualcomm Oryon CPU and next-gen Qualcomm Adreno GPU. Improvements should enable better phone speeds, camera, AI, and more. Nearly every major smartphone launch in the past year has shared a common theme: the devices have an increasing amount of on-device, advanced AI features. These experiences are only made possible by the chipset powering the phone, and Qualcomm is making even more possible with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. On Wednesday, at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, the company unveiled its newest mobile platform, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset. This chipset features upgrades to the CPU and GPU to power better camera, AI, and gaming experiences across future smartphones from partners, which have included Samsung, Oppo, and OnePlus. Also: Report: OpenAI will launch its own AI chip next year One of the biggest standouts is its new 3rd-gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which the company said is the fastest CPU in the world with peak performance at up to 4.6GHz. This upgrade should translate into faster speeds when using your device, including when multitasking, gaming, launching apps, and more. I ran the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark, a CPU performance benchmark that simulates how people use smartphones in everyday life, on a reference device. It scored 3786 single-core and 12094 multi-core, which are both considered very good. In the AI-first world we live in, the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, responsible for handling a lot of the AI load, had to get some upgrades. It now sports even more AI accelerators, enabling it to run 37% faster speeds and 16% better performance per watt, according to the company. This should enable it to run large language models (LLMs) on-device without sacrificing battery. The Qualcomm Sensing Hub, which includes on-device AI learning features such as a personal knowledge graph and Qualcomm Personal Scribe, also got enhancements that, when paired with the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, help unlock new agentic AI experiences. Essentially, the agentic AI assistant would be personalized to your needs. Making recommendations based on the device is an important element, as it keeps all of the information that it learns about you, such as conversations, routines, and preferences, on the device. This maximizes security by forgoing having to send your information to the cloud. Also: What Nvidia's stunning $5 billion Intel bet means for enterprise AI and next-gen laptops Beyond AI, other compute-heavy activities, such as gaming, will see improvements as well. The next-generation Qualcomm Adreno GPU achieves 23% better performance and a 20% reduction in power consumption than the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, according to Qualcomm. In the Geekbench 6 GPU benchmark, it scored 27925, which is also considered a competitive performance. The introduction of Adreno High Performance Memory (HPM) contributes to highly responsive gameplay. In the content-capturing realm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 supports a full suite of pro-grade video tools, including recording in Advanced Professional Video (APV) Codec and Dragon fusion, a fully computational video pipeline that allows every frame to be extracted with as much detail as a quick photo and context-aware auto-focus, auto exposure, and auto-white balance. Meanwhile, Snapdragon Audio Sense is a suite of microphone technology that enables the recording of some pro-level sound with wind-noise rejection, audio zoom, and HDR audio. Photography wasn't left behind, as the Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP), responsible for computational photography such as Night Vision 3.0, was upgraded to a 20-bit pipeline for 4x the dynamic range. Lastly, the Qualcomm X85 5G Modem-RF, integrated with the Qualcomm 5G AI Processor, is meant to unlock "the fastest, most battery-efficient, and reliable 5G Advanced connectivity" with peak download speeds of up to 12.5 Gbps and upload speeds of 3.7Gbps, according to the company. Disclosure: The cost of Sabrina Ortiz's travel to Maui, Hawaii, for the Snapdragon Summit was covered by Qualcomm, a common industry practice for long-distance trips. The judgments and opinions of ZDNET's writers and editors are always independent of the companies we cover. Artificial Intelligence