Qualcomm has just introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 here in Maui at Snapdragon Summit. This is technically only the second generation for the “Elite” name, but Snapdragon is continuing on from the base Snapdragon 8 series that was first announced back in 2021.
The new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 sports 3rd-gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores, and it’s the “fastest mobile CPU ever”. It also has state-of-the-art performance, efficiency, and on-device AI processing with a max clock speed of 4.6GHz. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is 35% more efficient and 20% more powerful than the previous generation.
This is once again a 3nm chipset, with eight cores. There are 6 performance cores that are clocked at up to 3.62GHz, and two Prime cores at 4.6GHz. So this is the same sort of setup as the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
It does sport all of the usual goodies inside this system-on-a-chip, including Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, Hexagon NPU, the AI Engine, and Sensing Hub. On the networking side of things, it has the Qualcomm X85 5G Modem-RF, which is capable of 5G Advanced, 5G mmWave, and Sub-6GHz, along with 5G Standalone and non-standalone modes.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices launch “in the coming days”
Similar to last year, we expect to see new devices announced with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in “the coming days” according to Qualcomm. We’re expecting Xiaomi’s new 17 series will be first. Though if it’s anything like last year, where the Xiaomi 16 was announced right after Snapdragon Summit, but didn’t launch globally until Mobile World Congress in March.
Other OEMs that Qualcomm is naming as using the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 include HONOR, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, POCO, realme, REDMI, RedMagic, ROG, Samsung, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.