Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at the Snapdragon Summit, introducing its most powerful mobile platform for flagship Android smartphones, launching later this year and into 2026. This year, the focus is on AI, video, and improved efficiency across the board.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC (system-on-chip) comes with Qualcomm"s third-generation Oryon CPU, featuring two Prime cores running up to 4.6GHz and six Performance cores reaching up to 3.62GHz. Qualcomm says that this should bring a performance improvement of 20% compared to its predecessor and up to 35% better power efficiency as well, while the overall SoC improvement is at 16%. The Adreno GPU on this is also improved as per Qualcomm, delivering up to 23% better gaming performance and 20% less power consumption.
AI is at the center of this year"s value proposition of the SoC, and its Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is now 37% faster and 16% more efficient, optimized for individualized, context-aware AI experiences, according to Qualcomm. The chip maker also says that it"s pioneering “agentic AI,” bringing more advanced, on-device agents that can learn, automate, and naturally interact with users.
Qualcomm"s NPU gains can also be seen with its X2 Elite and Extreme processors, announced earlier at the Snapdragon Summit 2025, which will power flagship ARM PCs.
Oppo also demonstrated on-device AI inference using the chip, exceeding 200 tokens per second and supporting a context length of up to 128K, which is the equivalent of roughly 200,000 words or 300 pages of text, entirely on the device.
There"s good news for content creators as well, as the 8 Elite Gen 5 becomes the first mobile platform to support the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, enabling near-lossless video capture and high flexibility in post-production editing. It also supports up to 48MP triple cameras and 108MP single sensors, with advanced features like Dragon Fusion computational imaging, context-aware autofocus, and a fully computational video pipeline.
For connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 integrates the X85 modem, which should offer significant reductions in gaming latency with AI-enhanced Wi-Fi. The chip also features full Unreal Engine 5 compatibility this year, with support for mesh shading, allowing better grouping of geometry in graphic-intensive games and enabling smarter GPU-driven rendering for better efficiency, as well as improved developer tools for graphics.
The first wave of smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is already on the way, led by the Xiaomi 17 series and soon with other brands like OnePlus, Honor, Oppo, Vivo, and more.