Qualcomm has announced its new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, and it might give future Android devices more power than Apple’s latest iPhones.
Qualcomm has finally taken the wraps off of its latest and greatest mobile chipset, in the form of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Yes, that’s the real name of the new chipset –- and yes, it’s a direct successor to the Snapdragon 8 Elite from last year.
Naming aside, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 actually should represent a meaningful upgrade over last year’s mobile platform. It could bring a whole new level of performance to the best-performing new Android chips for the year — and perhaps even put them ahead of Apple’s best, like the new iPhone 17 Pro. To learn more about it, Qualcomm brought me out to its annual Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii, where I learned about the chips and their performance. Here’s what you need to know about Qualcomm’s new chips and how well they could perform against the competition, including Apple’s best new chips.
Over the past 10 years or so, chip updates have included basic performance boosts, but have also leaned more heavily towards diversification of chip capabilities. For the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm seems to be turning that around a little, and in fact, the company says that its third-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU is the fastest mobile CPU ever.
The new CPU offers a 4.6GHz clock speed, which Qualcomm says combines with a low-latency large cache for more responsive multitasking and gaming. The company says the new Oryon CPU delivers a performance boost of 20% over the last-generation model. It’s not all about the CPU, either. There’s a new Adreno GPU architecture that Qualcomm says will boost graphics-heavy gaming by 23%. In other words, no matter what you’re doing with your phone, you should see a performance boost with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
