Qualcomm today announced the flagship system-on-a-chip that will grace almost every high-end Android smartphone for the next 12 months. Dubbed the Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 (don’t ask where versions two through four went), the company claims a 20% boost in year-over-year CPU performance and a 23% uplift in GPU performance, all while keeping things even more efficient than in years past.
I got to test the chip’s benchmarking capabilities on a custom-made Qualcomm Reference Device at the company’s annual Snapdragon Summit (disclosure: they paid for my travel, but not my coverage), and everything from Geekbench 6.5 to 3DMark’s onerous Wildlife Extreme tests showed unrelenting performance. To wit, the device scored higher in Geekbench’s single- and multi-core tests than Apple’s recently-released iPhone 17 Pro series, whose A19 Pro SoC proved to show significant year-over-year improvements in both performance and efficiency.
Credit: Daniel Bader / Android Police
That said, it’s difficult to put much value in these numbers given that Qualcomm’s reference devices tend to be considerably bulkier and more thermally endowed than products that eventually hit the market from companies like Samsung, Motorola, OPPO, Vivo, and others. Particularly with the market moving towards a thinner-is-better mindset, it will be interesting to see how much the Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 ends up being throttled in the real world, particularly after sustained load. For instance, the reference design hit staggering numbers of 3900 and 12500 for Geekbench’s single- and multi-core, respectively, but in general these reference devices end up performing 10-20% better than shipping products when all is said and done.
Still, Qualcomm is deservedly very proud of the third-generation Oryon cores inside this chip, and since it’s likely built on TSMC’s new N3P process, which is reportedly more efficient than the N3E fabrication used for the majority of last year’s flagship SoCs, the company is able to crank up performance core speeds to a staggering 4.6 Ghz, up 3% from last year’s 4.47 Ghz speeds. Even the efficiency cores can hit 3.62 Ghz.
Qualcomm Reference Design benchmarks
All of this bread-and-butter power is being augmented by a massive boost to the company’s Hexagon NPU, which powers a new generation of Agentic AI functionality, including a “Personal Scribe” that Qualcomm is claiming to work alongside existing on-device LLMs to perform contextual actions as you go about your day. During the announcement keynote, Qualcomm President and CEO, Cristiano Amon, even envisioned a day that its chips power an ultra-efficient 6G modem that use a series of agents to predict your needs on a minute-to-minute basis, though you’ll need to wait at least another five years for that dystopian nightmare to come to fruition.
Elsewhere, the requisite improvements to the company’s baseband and image signal processor are in fine form as well, with the X85 5G modem claiming to do 30% faster AI inferencing while the ISP is the first to support the burgeoning Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec for ultra-efficient HD video.
The first devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will be announced “in the coming days,” according to Qualcomm, with commitments from Honor, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, POCO, realme, REDMI, RedMagic, ROG, Samsung, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.
