Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 today as the chipset most likely to be found in your next high-end phone from Samsung or OnePlus. It won’t be in the next Google Pixel phone, like the Pixel 11, but you’ll see it in a lot of other devices.

What do you need to know? We’ll keep it simple because talking about mobile chipsets is about as fun as, well, let’s just say we’d rather talk about almost anything else.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has the following improvements:

• Qualcomm is calling the 3rd Gen Qualcomm Oryon CPU the “fastest mobile CPU ever” and it boosts performance by 20% over the Snapdragon 8 Elite from last year in single-core and 17% in multi-core. “Responsiveness improvement,” which is an odd way to word this, is boosted by 32%.
• The new Adreno GPU “enhances graphics-rich gaming” by 23% and a 25% Ray Tracing improvement.
• The Hexagon NPU inside offers 37% faster performance for all of your AI needs.
• As far as power savings, we’re looking at savings of 35% in CPU, 20% in GPU, 16% in AI, and 16% overall.
• This is a 3nm chip.

What else? Ummm, this chip is the “world’s first mobile platform to record in Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec,” for those into professional-level video production. We also have “groundbreaking” AI-powered camera technology, which probably just means faster AI slop – please don’t use your phones for AI slop, people.

And that’s it.

Companies have already committed to using it and they are: Honor, iQOO, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, POCO, realme, REDMI, RedMagic, ROG, Samsung, Sony, vivo, Xiaomi, and ZTE. Qualcomm says that new devices could launch “in the coming days” with the chip inside. Wild to think.

// Qualcomm