When Qualcomm announced its high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset in November, it mentioned that a non-Elite version would be coming, designed to power a more affordable tier of flagship phones. Now, that chip has finally arrived, with a slight drop in performance but the same core feature set.
Qualcomm compared the 8th Gen 5 to the 8th Gen 3 from 2023, claiming efficiency improvements as well as a 36 percent improvement in CPU performance and an 11 percent improvement in GPU performance compared to that chip. But since the 8th Gen 3 is two years old, and Qualcomm has changed the CPU architecture in the meantime, the more recent 8th Gen 5 is a more useful comparison.
The 8 Gen 5 has the same Orion CPU architecture as the Elite, but slower – its six performance cores cap out at 3.32 GHz, its two prime cores at 3.8 GHz, while the Elite has 3.62 GHz and 4.6 GHz respectively. On paper, it performs even less than last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, although we’ll have to wait to see how actual smartphones compare in practice.
There are some other downgrades from the new Elite as well. The regular Gen 5’s X80 modem has slightly slower peak 5G speeds, though Bluetooth and Wi-Fi performance should be similar, and both satellite and ultra wideband (UWB) are supported. The specs on its Adreno GPU and Hexagon AI NPU have been downgraded slightly, although Qualcomm has gone into less detail on exact comparisons there, and it can’t use the latest UFS 4.1 storage. But both chipsets have other features in common, including charging capabilities, display support, and most camera hardware options.
Qualcomm says several manufacturers, including Motorola, OnePlus and Vivo, have already agreed to use the chip in new phones, the first devices of which will be shown “in the coming weeks.” This could mean we’ll see it in the OnePlus 15R, which is now confirmed to launch in the US on December 17.
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