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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Philip Michaels

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 unveiled — here's all the performance and AI upgrades likely coming to Galaxy S26 Ultra

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset in handheld phone.

Qualcomm is looking to fight fire with fire. Just a few weeks after Apple unveiled the new A19 chips that power its iPhone 17 models, Qualcomm today (September 24) showed off the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 system-on-chip that will power many of the leading Android phones for the next year. And like its chief rival from Apple, this silicon promises a big performance boost.

The 3nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 features an 8-core CPU, along with an upgraded GPU and a neural processing unit that Qualcomm says has been redesigned from the ground up. Combined, those components should deliver what Qualcomm touts as the world's fastest mobile system-on-chip. And we can confirm that early benchmarks of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5-powered reference device back up those claims.

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