The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 flagship chip was launched this morning, once again offering an increase in the capabilities of the processor chip for Android mobile devices. The chip retains the use of 3nm technology and 8 cores of the third-generation Oryon CPU.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 uses a core configuration of 2X Prime Oryon CPU cores at 4.6 GHz and 6X Performance Oryon CPU cores at 3.62 GHz. This is matched by the latest Adreno GPU with High Performance Memory (HPM) which brings support for Tile Memory Heap, Mesh Shading and full support for Unreal Engine 5. The speed of the two CPU clusters has increased from 4.32 GHz and 3.53 GHz last year.
The question is, will console and PC-level games finally come to Android this year? This was promised by Qualcomm last year but it never came while Apple's efforts were less well received by gamers because the graphics quality was clearly lower.
With the Prime core operating at 4.6 GHz, the 8 Elite Gen 5 is the fastest mobile CPU chip to date. This offers a 20% increase in single-core CPU performance and a 17% increase in multi-core performance. Meanwhile, the GPU offers a 23% increase.
The new generation Hexagon NPU used is also 37% faster than last year, allowing it to run larger linear language models (LLMs) directly from the device while reducing battery consumption. With us now in the era of AI, this year Qualcomm is focusing more on improving its performance.
Up to 320MP cameras are supported by a choice of dual 108MP or tri-camera 48MP. Other specifications include the use of the Snapdragon X85 5G model, QHD+ 240Hz screen support, up to 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, UFS 4.1 storage, USB Version 3.1 Gen 2, XPAN audio and Qualcomm Quick Charge 5 charging.
The earliest manufacturer to use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the Xiaomi 17 series, and as usual, it will also be used by other manufacturers such as Samsung, with models to be launched in the coming months.