Survey confirms: You don’t need any ‘elite’ chip for your next phone

Not every car needs to be a Ferrari. Even if you have the means to pick one up on a whim, just being a very fast car doesn’t necessarily make it the ideal vehicle for every occasion — god forbid you need to store anything in the trunk.

That same situation applies to smartphones and the chips powering them. Every year, we see companies like Qualcomm introduce their latest silicon, trying to wow us with performance metrics that make the previous generation’s chips look positively glacial in comparison. That’s an important part of progress, absolutely, but just because there’s a new super-high-end option out there doesn’t mean it’s the best chip for the phone you need.

Even though it’s not the absolute fastest chip in town, Qualcomm has put together an offering here that looks like it makes a fair amount of sense on paper: The chip mixes features from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and the even earlier Snapdragon 8 Elite, and while it doesn’t quite hit the raw performance of either, it still manages to improve a lot over the 8 Gen 3 — and perhaps most importantly, won’t demand the same premium price tag as those more capable chips.

While we get the argument for why a new Android phone might want to use the 8 Gen 5 instead of an Elite chip, we can also appreciate how this is a bit of an emotional decision — saying “I want the highest-end phone I can get” is easy, while finding the value in a balance between price and performance takes quite a bit more nuance. Would shoppers end up getting there, too? Well, we set up a poll in the hopes of finding out just that.

After polling over 5,500 of you, we’re seeing that nearly half of our respondents are fully on-board with what the 8 Gen 5 is selling.

Among those of you not convinced, we’re looking at a roughly three-way split between those who just want the fastest chip around, full stop, those who aren’t sure that any potential cost savings here will justify the performance hit, and and those who are still waiting to see how commercial devices actually running this silicon end up performing.

Looking through the comments accompanying our poll, readers like p51d007 and Throwback mention how they don’t expect most users will actually need the performance the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 delivers, never really tapping into its full potential.

That’s reassuring, but Android users still seem to find a lot of appeal in a non-Elite version of Qualcomm’s top mobile chip. We’ll be curious to learn how sales of these devices perform as we start seeing hardware arrive in the new year.