- Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform for future smartphones
- It focuses not solely on operating AI options, but additionally gathering data for future AI fashions
- The first Elite Gen 5 telephones will come from Xiaomi, and it’ll doubtless energy a rumored Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
At the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm immediately introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 cell platform, the chipset that may doubtless energy this 12 months’s latest flagship Android smartphones, just like the presumed Samsung Galaxy S26 and OnePlus 14. Of course, the platform focuses on empowering AI options, and it goes additional than ever to seize data that may feed your private machine studying fashions.
The mannequin Qualcomm has in thoughts is so-called Agentic AI. The idea of Agentic AI is a machine studying instrument that does every thing for you. Whatever you would possibly wish to do together with your smartphone, as an alternative of tapping and swiping, you simply speak to the AI agent. It will determine the mandatory steps and take these actions.
In addition to faster application processing and greater graphics capabilities, Qualcomm is focusing more holistically on a future with AI at the center. As it has been saying for years, AI is the new UI, meaning artificial intelligence will be the interface we use to control our smartphones and laptops.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will use your phone as training data for future AI
While past chipsets have included a neural processing unit (NPU) to handle machine learning tools like large language models (LLMs), the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will have improved capabilities to gather sensor data from your smartphone. That might include your camera, microphone, accelerometer (motion) and magnetometer (compass), and any other sensors that gather data.
Why does the Snapdragon need your sensor data? Qualcomm says past AI models have been trained on data from the Internet, but it plans on leveraging its position inside millions of devices to gather all of the training data it can from your smartphone’s sensors. If you own a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device, using the device every day will create training data that may be used for future AI models.
That means the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 won’t just generate images with generative AI tools, it will also capture images from the camera sensors, or sound from the microphones – data from any of the onboard sensors – to feed future machine learning models. Those models still need to be built, but phone makers and AI developers will have more tools in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 than ever before.
Is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 the fastest mobile platform? Yes.
Qualcomm says its new chipset is the fastest mobile platform you’ll find, a shot directly at Apple, which made the very same declare about its Apple A19 Pro chipset on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air. In the previous, the Snapdragon 8 Elite was the quickest chipset for multicore efficiency, whereas the Apple chipset was quicker on single-core benchmarks. This 12 months’s Apple A19 Pro was the quickest on each forms of checks.
I had an opportunity to benchmark the brand new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 on a reference gadget, and up to now Qualcomm’s claims have confirmed true, although that will change once I get to check the brand new platform on an actual, retail smartphone.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the quickest cellphone I’ve examined. I examined it towards a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset inside, and towards an iPhone 17 Pro Max with the Apple A19 Pro chipset. In each benchmark take a look at I attempted from 3DMark and GeekBench, the Snapdragon Gen 5 chipset beat the opposite platforms.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 appears a lot quicker than the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and marginally quicker than the Apple A19 Pro, however the distinction is actual and noticeable on graphics-intensive benchmark checks. You can really see that the Snapdragon is operating at the next framerate – it’s not simply meaningless numbers.
Here’s when you can purchase a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 cellphone
Still, it will likely be as much as the cellphone makers to make use of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to its full potential. We anticipate the primary cellphone with the brand new platform inside would be the upcoming Xiaomi 17 sequence, adopted carefully by OnePlus (and Oppo), if latest historical past is a information. Last 12 months’s OnePlus 13 launched in China nearly instantly after the Snapdragon 8 Elite was introduced.
Eventually, it’s doubtless that Samsung will use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform on some or all of its Galaxy S26 gadgets. Samsung traditionally launches its flagship smartphones in January, and for the previous couple of years, it has sourced a particular version Snapdragon from Qualcomm with a barely overclocked main core. That provides it a bonus in benchmark testing, even when the distinction is negligible.
Qualcomm presents specs for its smartphone platforms, however these are the theoretical capabilities of the chipset, and it will likely be as much as the cellphone makers to drive the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to its full potential.
For occasion, Qualcomm says the Gen 5 platform’s picture processors can drive as much as three 48MP cameras concurrently for a triple-camera recording. We nonetheless want a smartphone maker to construct that cellphone with three cameras and the software program to make it work.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is perhaps nice for gaming and lengthy battery life
Gamers ought to be excited for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Qualcomm says the brand new Adreno GPU inside will supply a 23% enhance to total efficiency and a 20% discount in energy utilization.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite was particularly notable in my testing for its effectivity – telephones with that Snapdragon inside lasted for much longer than telephones with different chipsets. I’m excited to listen to that the Gen 5 platform presents even extra battery life potential.
We’ll have a deeper dive into the capabilities of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 platform, in addition to the brand new Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme laptop computer chipsets, because the Snapdragon Summit continues. Qualcomm flew TechSwitch cellphone and laptop computer editors to Maui to cowl the occasion, and we’ll be on web site to dig deep into the platforms’ potential and to grill Qualcomm executives for his or her tackle what’s coming subsequent.