Qualcomm flew us out to its annual Summit in Maui, Hawaii, to get an early look at its latest Snapdragon products, namely its 8 Elite Gen 5 for mobile and its upcoming X2 Elite Series lineup for laptops. As mentioned in the other report, the company provided benchmarking sessions for both portfolios, but at this time, I (along with the other attending media) were only allowed to show the metrics for the former.
As per Qualcomm’s status quo, the 8 Elite Gen 5 chips were packaged in the reference smartphone shell, although to be fair, many of the Snapdragon Insiders present were a little less than subtle at hiding other smartphone designs, one of which very obviously belonged to a particular Korean brand, thus giving me both an insight and peek at what will be coming at the start of next year. Of course, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t allowed to take any photos of these units.
Moving on, here’s a rough summary of the 8 Elite Gen 5. Built on TSMC’s 3nm process, the chipset is built with eight CPU cores – 2 Prime cores run at a maximum speed of 4.6GHz, while the remaining six Performance cores turbo up to 3.62GHz – a beefed up Adreno GPU capable of supporting display resolutions of QHD+ at 240Hz, or 4K at 120Hz While running at 1.2GHz.
Qualcomm is going big with AI this round, and it’s pushing the agenda with the new Hexagon NPU in the 8 Elite Gen 5. Oddly enough, the mobile chipmaker doesn’t actually mention the TOPS it can produce.
Other details of the 8 Elite Gen 5 include Qualcomm’s X85 5G Modem, a new Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) with Triple 20-bit AI-ISP, support for Bluetooth 6, and support for up to 24GB LPDDR5x memory, running at a maximum speed of 5,300MHz. As always, the chipset does support the company’s aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless Audio.
As for the performance, Qualcomm basically gave us a laundry list of benchmark tests that were already pre-installed, ranging from GeekBench 6 to Speedometer, the latter used to test how well the phone handles opening, closing, and swiping between apps and windows, at gradually increasing speeds.
On UL’s 3DMark Steel Nomad test, it was interesting to see the 8 Elite Gen 5 “struggling” for a bit, holding an average of 25 fps throughout the test. It’s an improvement, no doubt, but it isn’t a stretch to say that I was expecting a little more oomph than that.
You can expect Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to ship out in next year’s flagship devices, with rollouts to happen throughout 2026.
