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It’s that time of year again when the smartphone arms race heats up. Apple, Google, and MediaTek have all introduced powerful new phone chips, and now it’s Qualcomm’s turn with its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform.
Qualcomm’s next-gen chip is designed to power many Android phone makers’ flagship phones in 2025 and beyond. Brands that have signed up to use it include Asus, Honor, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Poco, Realme, Redmi, RedMagic, Samsung, Sony, Vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE.
Not all of these phones will be sold in the United States, but the chip is likely to be in the OnePlus 15, Samsung’s Galaxy S26 series, and the Galaxy Z Fold 8.
(Credit: Qualcomm)
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 features the fastest mobile CPU ever, according to Qualcomm’s testing of its third-gen Oryon tech. It’s 20% faster than the chip launched in 2024, and the CPU is 35% more power efficient. The whole Gen 5 SoC is 16% more power efficient.
The new Snapdragon remains on the 3nm process first used on last year’s chip. It features two 4.6GHz prime cores and six 3.62GHz performance cores, which all use a 64-bit architecture.
Qualcomm says it will allow for “lightning-fast app launches and instantaneous multitasking to fast-paced gameplay and responsive mobile content creation.”
(Credit: Qualcomm)
It’s unclear how this will all compare in real-life testing to Apple’s A19 from the iPhone 17 series, Google’s Tensor G5, or MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 was already plenty powerful, so this improved CPU should improve performance across most of your device. A refreshed Qualcomm Adreno GPU allows for a 23% improvement in gaming performance and a 20% reduction in power consumption.
Other gaming features include Tile Memory Heap, which helps optimize RAM usage to further reduce the amount of power needed to play graphically intensive titles. There’s also Mesh Shading, which allows developers to implement smarter GPU-driven rendering.
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It’s 2025, so Qualcomm is focusing its Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 on AI improvements for your phone. The brand says it will let manufacturers enter the agentic AI age with tools that can better adapt to you, and then act on your behalf.
Qualcomm’s new Personal Scribe feature brings “an agentic AI assistant that makes recommendations and acts on your behalf based on your routine, preferences, and conversations.” It works with Qualcomm’s Sensing Hub features alongside each user’s personal knowledge graph to learn what you would do in each scenario to improve these recommendations.
It’s unclear how phone brands will implement this right now. It may help power other AI assistants, such as Google Gemini, to become agentic on your phone, or it may only appear as a Qualcomm-specific tool.
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Qualcomm’s Neural Processing Unit, the element of a phone’s chip used for running large language models, has had a major upgrade, making it 37% faster than the last-gen and 16% more power efficient.
AI continues into the camera with a new feature that extracts frames from videos to give you the quality of a photograph from any moment in the video.
Qualcomm has also embraced the Advanced Professional Video Codec, and there are new context-aware auto-focus, auto-exposure, and auto-white balance features.
AI features have also been added to the 8 Gen 5’s connectivity elements, with Qualcomm claiming up to 50% lower gaming latency thanks to a new AI-enhanced Wi-Fi feature.
The new FastConnect 7900 Mobile Connectivity System, which uses Wi-Fi 7, is also said to offer up to 40% power savings compared with previous versions.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is likely to arrive on smartphones throughout 2026, but we may see some devices with the chip debut in late 2025. It’ll be competing with the newly announced MediaTek 9500 to power those top-end Android phones, but most manufacturers who sell phones in the US lean toward Qualcomm’s tech.
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