Three Major Upgrades for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5!

Snapdragon’s new naming scheme seems to have been mashed between its current offerings.

Anyway, Qualcomm has announced the launch of their new flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at the aptly named Snapdragon Summit; the latest in their year-to-year upgrades when it comes to mobile processing power.

Specs are quite insane even with just the broad strokes. While the Snapdragon 8 Elite found in flagships like the Motorola Razr 60 Ultra 5G already runs at 4.32Ghz, the Gen 5 could run up to 4.6Ghz, which is insane for a chip that’s meant to go into compact phones. However, how does this translate to actual performance? Quite well from the looks of it but with a few caveats.

AI and Machine Learning

To start, Qualcomm advertises a 20% improvement when it comes to actual performance and around 16% when it comes to battery efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. But apart from traditional benchmarks like Geekbench 6, Qualcomm has also added a machine learning benchmark from MLPerf AI.

And there’s a lot of promise on this front. Especially since Qualcomm’s using a next-generation Hexagon NPU with AI Accelerators, which should help you run LLMs and other AI software locally.

Image classification tasks have improved by 19% while super-resolution workloads and upscaling are up by 55%. In real terms, you should expect prompts and upscaling to generate minutes faster, which could have a cumulative effect the more you use the phone for these tasks.

So, it is impressive. However, this will still depend on how well AI apps and software optimizes around the new hardware this Snapdragon generation is packing.

Additionally, it will still depend on how well the actual phone brands build their hardware around the new chip. Qualcomm’s test model has been tuned to really give the chip the space and thermal headroom to flex its capabilities but we can’t see this stretching as far in a thin and light model for example.

Gaming Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 also comes with a new GPU to really boost its performance in games and for game developers in the form of Adreno High Performance Memory (Adreno HPM). This is essentially 18MB of dedicated cache which helps with things like loading times and stuttering.

Additionally, this new Adreno GPU also reportedly features “full Unreal Engine 5” compatibility including support for mesh shading, Nanite, and Lumen for an uplift in graphics quality.

To be fair, a lot of games right now aren’t nearly as demanding as these stress tests and benchmark tools. So if your game is already running at say, 60 FPS on high or even 120 FPS, there won’t really be much improvement past that given the nature of the games.

However, this should at least help with thermal throttling during long play sessions, especially in hot places. Pair this with hardware boasting a robust cooling solution like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and you should expect excellent sustained performance across the board.

A Surprise for Mobile Videographers

Aside from games and AI, Qualcomm seems to be going after the mobile videography or vlogger crowd with this chip as well. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will reportedly feature Samsung’s Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, helping you get high-quality lossless video at smaller file sizes.

Apt timing too, considering Android 16 has finally brought APV codec support for phones. And yes, you can still make adjustments to things like highlights, shadows, or even color grading to your captured video. Much faster and easier too.

Qualcomm’s also looking to boost audio quality with Snapdragon Audio Sense, which they claim creates pro-level audio recording regardless of your environment thanks to wind noise reduction, HDR audio, and audio zoom. No need for additional microphones, says Qualcomm which is quite the claim to make.

It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how well this would hold up against the likes of say, the iPhone 16 Pro and its Apple ProRes feature, or even the Pixel 10 with AV1 encoding. Regardless of which brand comes ahead, the future of mobile video at least looks promising no matter your preference.

New phones should be coming out in the next few days, with the Xiaomi 17 series already confirmed to use these new chips. In the meantime, you can catch up on all the other new tech and accessories for your flagships when you shop here at Kimstore.

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