Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will be powering many flagship Android phones next year, and it has a few surprises beyond its silly name.
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.
