As expected, along with the latest laptop-class Arm SoC, the Snapdragon X2 Elite series Qualcomm has officially unveiled its latest flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The 8 Elite Gen 5 launch sees Qualcomm lean even further into AI workloads while adding a handful of spec upgrades to the new SoC. It features an Oryon Gen 3 CPU that has two Prime cores capable of up to 4.60 GHz and six Performance cores that run at up to 3.62 GHz, all of which is paired with 24 MB of cache split into 12 MB chunks—12 MB per core cluster. Qualcomm says this will increase single-core performance by 20% and multicore performance by 17%, compared to the likes of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, that is. Based on Geekbench Browser scores and the information shown off by Qualcomm in the presentation, this means the 8 Elite Gen 5 performs about on-par with its true predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 3, but early benchmarks from hands-on tests at the Snapdragon Summit tell a different story. It seems as though the 8 Elite Gen 5 delivers single-core Geekbench 6 results of around 3,800 points, with multicore scores coming in at around 12,400 points—a remarkable ~3,000 uplift over the current Geekbench leader, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 3 for Galaxy.

Of course, as with much of the recent tech announcements, Qualcomm is focusing heavily on AI workloads with the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. AI performance improvements and NPU upgrades abound, with Qualcomm claiming the new Hexagon NPU is 37% faster and 16% more power efficient than the previous generation. The new Hexagon NPU now also works together with the ISP to process videos more efficiently and quickly. Similarly to how ISPs typically process images, the NPU in the 8 Elite Gen 5 will be leveraged to manage things lighting, color reproduction, and sharpness. Qualcomm also demonstrated generative image processing with the example of removing glare and artifacts from images "instantly." The new NPU will also enable ModelBest on-device agentic AI with onboard training and a memory of past conversations. Supposedly, this AI will be able to access a number of on-device apps, files, and functions, including location, stored images, and social media in order to automatically post, classify photos, and do other generative tasks.