Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Will Samsung Use It?

Qualcomm just unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 at the ongoing Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. This processor represents the next evolution of their popular flagship line for smartphones. On paper, Qualcomm has made improvements across the board. The new chip boasts improved efficiency, new APV video codec support, and a big boost to raw gaming power. Of course, there’s also plenty of AI.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 specs

The new Snapdragon retains the 3nm process first used on last year’s chip. It features two 4.6GHz prime cores and six 3.62GHz performance cores, all using 64-bit architecture. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is 20% faster than last year’s chip, the CPU is 35% more power efficient. Overall, the whole Gen 5 SoC is 16% more power efficient. This could make a big difference in daily battery life on your Android smartphone.

When it comes to gaming, the refreshed Adreno GPU allows for 23% improvement in gaming performance, with 20% less power consumption. Qualcomm also unveiled Tile Memory Heap and Mesh Shading features for intense gaming. Tile Memory Heap optimizes RAM usage to reduce the amount of power to play games with intense graphics. The New Mesh Shading feature enables developers to implement smarter GPU-rendering in their games, to increase efficiency and performance.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 AI and Camera Improvements

Of course, Qualcomm focussed on AI improvements as well. Who would’ve thunk it? The new Gen 5 SoC is optimized for agentic AI experiences, allowing OEMs to build tools that adapt to the end user and act on their behalf. The new Personal Scribe feature brings an agentic AI assistant built-in to the mobile platform. This could allow Samsung and other brands to process data from a user’s personal knowledge graph in real-time. To be sure, this could improve the agentic capabilities of tools like Gemini and Bixby. The NPU for 8 Elite Gen 5 got a major year-over-year upgrade, with a 37% power increase, while also being 16% more efficient.

Camera improvements also come from AI. The 8 Elite Gen 5 can pluck any frame in a video and produce high quality images that look like photographs. More importantly, Qualcomm also added support for the Advanced Professional Video codec, along with context-aware auto-focus, auto-exposure, and auto-white balance. All of these improvements should be huge for the Galaxy S26 series camera lineup, that is, if Samsung opts to use Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

Galaxy S26: Exynos 2600 vs Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

There’s still quite a bit of doubt about whether Samsung will utilize the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 across the Galaxy S26 series. Samsung did nothing to quell this doubt with their keynote comments at the Snapdragon Summit. Speaking during the device keynote, Dr. Won-Joon Choi talked about the deep partnership between Qualcomm and Samsung. While discussing the succesful partnership on the Galaxy S25 series, Choi stopped short of saying the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 would power the new generation of Galaxy S devices. This is notable, as Samsung has made such comments at past Snapdragon Summit keynotes.

Could this mean that the Exynos 2600 will power the entire Galaxy S26 series? This seems very unlikely, as it looks like the S26 Ultra will get Snapdragon chips in all regions. However, it is possible that the S26 Pro and S26 Edge could both run Exynos 2600 exclusively. Given that Samsung did not confirm Snapdragon across the S26 series, the door is still open for Exynos to see a return to the spotlight in 2026.