This year's crop of flagship Android phones represents something of a victory lap for Qualcomm. Half a decade ago, Apple successfully scaled its A-series phone chips up to the laptop and desktop level. Now, Qualcomm is experiencing a similar leap in reverse. It designed laptop and desktop-class Snapdragon X Elite chips and brought their staple custom Oryon cores to the mobile system-on-a-chip (SoC) level with the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform.
As my colleague Harish Jonnalagadda recently confirmed in benchmark testing, the Snapdragon 8 Elite crushes what MediaTek and Google comparatively offer. However, Samsung and Qualcomm threw us a curveball when they co-designed the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor. It's a custom chip based on the Snapdragon 8 Elite platform but tailored to the Samsung Galaxy S25 series of smartphones.
