Qualcomm's New Mobile Chip Could Give Android Phones A Boost Over The iPhone 17 Pro

Qualcomm has finally taken the wraps off of its latest and greatest mobile chipset, in the form of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Yes, that's the real name of the new chipset –- and yes, it's a direct successor to the Snapdragon 8 Elite from last year.

Naming aside, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 actually should represent a meaningful upgrade over last year's mobile platform. It could bring a whole new level of performance to the best-performing new Android chips for the year — and perhaps even put them ahead of Apple's best, like the new iPhone 17 Pro. To learn more about it, Qualcomm brought me out to its annual Snapdragon Summit event in Hawaii, where I learned about the chips and their performance. Here's what you need to know about Qualcomm's new chips and how well they could perform against the competition, including Apple's best new chips.

Over the past 10 years or so, chip updates have included basic performance boosts, but have also leaned more heavily towards diversification of chip capabilities. For the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm seems to be turning that around a little, and in fact, the company says that its third-generation Qualcomm Oryon CPU is the fastest mobile CPU ever.

The new CPU offers a 4.6GHz clock speed, which Qualcomm says combines with a low-latency large cache for more responsive multitasking and gaming. The company says the new Oryon CPU delivers a performance boost of 20% over the last-generation model. It's not all about the CPU, either. There's a new Adreno GPU architecture that Qualcomm says will boost graphics-heavy gaming by 23%. In other words, no matter what you're doing with your phone, you should see a performance boost with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

These numbers can vary wildly from device to device — it remains to be seen exactly how phones equipped with the new chip perform with varying amounts of RAM and other shifting conditions.

I was able to conduct some benchmark tests with a reference device with the new chip inside, and it revealed some very impressive numbers. On GeekBench 6, the chip achieved a single-core score of 3,791 and a multi-core score of 11,994 -– both beating the A19 Pro-equipped iPhone 17 Pro Max. Beating Apple in single-core performance is particularly impressive -– that's where Apple has maintained a lead over the past few years. On 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme graphics test, the Snapdragon chip scored 8,420, which again, is very impressive –- and represents a big improvement over both the previous-generation Snapdragon chip as well as Apple's best chips right now. 

To be clear, there's a lot more to performance than benchmarks can reveal, and as mentioned, modern chips have diversified way beyond basic performance numbers. That said, Apple has enjoyed a lead in benchmarks for some time -– a trend that has started shifting over the past few years.

AI is obviously the hot topic right now, and Qualcomm is making some big claims about the AI performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. For starters, there are the basics of AI processing, and Qualcomm says that the new chip offers 37% faster NPU performance.

So, what exactly does that mean? Well, Qualcomm is specifically targeting agentic AI use, giving its chip the ability to process the largest on-device large language models for mobile use. Agentic AI, obviously, is a bit of a buzzword right now, and there aren't a whole lot of agentic AI use cases for consumers just yet, but these chips are designed to power phones for years to come, and you'll want to be able to make use of the latest and greatest software as it becomes available even if you have a phone that's a few years old.

On top of the improved Hexagon NPU, Qualcomm says that it has added AI accelerators to support the latest large language models without having a significant impact on battery life.

There are all kinds of other improvements in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 compared to the last generation chip. For example, there's a new Qualcomm Spectra image signal processor built into the platform that's designed to enable latest-generation computational photography features and is tightly integrated with the Hexagon NPU. This enables new features like Qualcomm's Night Vision 3.0, along with real-time tone adjustments. Perhaps even more notable is the fact that the Spectra ISP now supports 20-bit image pipelines, allowing for 4x the dynamic range.

As you would expect from Qualcomm, there are also improvements to the modem and networking technology. The platform offers the Qualcomm X85 5G modem, which Qualcomm says supports peak download speeds of up to 12.5 Gbps and upload speeds of 3.7 Gbps. This doesn't really represent what you'll see in the real world, but improved cellular connectivity on your device means that you'll be able to leverage faster speeds as cellular networks improve too. And with the Qualcomm FastConnect 7900 connectivity system, you'll get Wi-Fi 7 support with up to 40% power savings -– so connecting to the latest and greatest wireless networks won't drain your battery quite as much.

A suite of Android phone manufacturers will be announcing their first Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices in coming weeks, but expect the likes of Oppo, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Samsung, and others to be among the first.