Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 announced with 20% CPU performance improvement and Agentic AI support

As promised, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC as its flagship chip at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii. It's a successor to last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite and is touted as the "world's fastest mobile system-on-a-chip" by Qualcomm.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (SM8850-AC) is built on a 3nm process and comes with the third-gen Oryon CPU, which boosts CPU performance by 20% compared to its predecessor. CPU power efficiency has also been improved by 35%.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 features an octa-core CPU in a 2+6 configuration, meaning two prime cores with a maximum frequency of 4.6GHz and six performance cores that are clocked at up to 3.62GHz.

The flagship chip also features an Adreno GPU to handle graphically intensive tasks. While Qualcomm didn't mention the GPU name in its press materials, the chipmaker said the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's GPU delivers 23% improved performance, 20% better power efficiency, and 25% improved Ray Tracing. Overall, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 increases power efficiency by up to 16%, which, Qualcomm claims, equates to 1 hour and 48 minutes of additional playtime for gamers.

Speaking of gaming, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 comes with complete Unreal Engine 5 support for console-quality visuals, while Tile Memory Heap optimizes memory usage and bandwidth, and Mesh Shading allows developers to group geometry more efficiently.

Since this is 2025, most hardware announcements are incomplete without AI thrown into the mix, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is no different. The chipset has a 37% faster Hexagon NPU and upgraded Qualcomm Sensing Hub, which together unlock agentic AI assistants for personalized experiences.

"Through continuous on-device learning and real-time sensing, multimodal AI models understand the user, enabling proactive recommendations and situation-based prompt enhancements—with user data staying on device," said Qualcomm in a press release.

On the imaging front, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 features Qualcomm's Spectra AI ISP with triple 20-bit AI-ISPs and Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, making it the world's first mobile platform to have APV support.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's key highlights

You can head this way for the complete specs of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC.

Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will power devices from global OEMs and smartphone brands, including vivo, iQOO, Oppo, Realme, OnePlus, Honor, ZTE, nubia, RedMagic, Xiaomi, Asus, Sony, and Samsung.

Devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will be launched in the coming days.

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