Qualcomm revealed its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip in September to energy absolutely the top-tier Android phones popping out in 2026. The $900 OnePlus 15 launched this month and is the primary cellphone out there with the brand new chip within the US. Now, the corporate is providing a brand new chip — the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 — for handsets that want barely much less digital horsepower for decrease price, resulting in cheaper however nonetheless highly effective telephones.
Qualcomm usually gives a number of variations of its chips at various efficiency ranges and costs to swimsuit the wants of phone-makers. Even inside the cream of the crop — phones that price $700 or extra — corporations might go for a much less highly effective and, presumably, a inexpensive chip to energy their lower-priced units. This might embrace telephones just like the just-announced OnePlus 15R, which does not have a value however follows different R-series handsets which have barely much less spectacular specs and value lower than their premium siblings.
The brand new Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 has a fancy lineage, however Qualcomm sees it as a follow-up to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, launched in 2023 — which is why the corporate solely launched comparable figures to that 2023 chip. The foremost improve between the 2 is that the brand new 8 Gen 5 has the corporate’s proprietary Oryon central processing unit with 36% improved efficiency and 42% higher energy effectivity in comparison with the 8 Gen 3. Comparably, the brand new chip’s graphics processing unit has 11% higher efficiency and 28% higher energy effectivity than its predecessor’s GPU.
The Oryon CPU within the 8 Gen 5 permits the AI agent options, like contextual solutions based mostly on private information, that debuted in final 12 months’s Snapdragon 8 Elite cellphone chip and have continued within the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The corporate launched the “Elite” moniker to model them as the brand new highest bar for efficiency. The 8 Gen 5’s CPU reaches speeds of three.8GHz, whereas the 8 Elite Gen 5 reaches as much as 4.6GHz, displaying a transparent hole in functionality — however aside from that, Qualcomm did not launch efficiency figures for a way the 8 Gen 5 compares to its even higher-end chip sibling.
Regardless, the 8 Gen 5 will energy flagship telephones from corporations like OnePlus, Qualcomm mentioned in a press launch. The primary units utilizing the chip will launch within the coming weeks, which doubtless contains the OnePlus 15R that the phone-maker confirmed will launch on Dec. 17. OnePlus’ R-series telephones have been barely much less highly effective than their flagship counterparts however have been priced decrease because of this. As an example, the OnePlus 13R (powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) launched again in January was much less highly effective than the OnePlus 13 but additionally $300 cheaper at launch.
