At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit off the west coast of Maui, the company unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, its next-generation chip intended for next year’s top-tier Android phones.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 succeeds last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, which saw the mobile debut of Qualcomm’s in-house Oryon central processing unit for more power and efficiency over older silicon from Arm. As expected, this year’s 8 Elite Gen 5 improves performance over its predecessor. The upgrades include faster processing for AI agents, which can take in data from cameras and microphones to make informed suggestions to phone owners.

«[Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5] enables personalized AI agents to see what you see, hear what you hear and think with you in real time,» said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and general manager of mobile handset at Qualcomm in a press release.

Qualcomm announced that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will feature in premium phones from Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Honor, Oppo, Vivo and more brands. The first devices will be announced in the coming days, Qualcomm said. 

Compared to last year’s mobile chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 CPU has 20% better performance and up to 35% improved power efficiency, while the graphics processing unit has 23% better performance and reduces power consumption by 20%, meaning longer gaming sessions while playing on phones. 

For AI, the chip’s neural processing unit is 37% faster, and it can handle AI inquiries at 220 tokens per second — an improvement over its predecessor’s 70 tokens per second, or the Snapdragon X Elite PC chip’s 30 tokens per second. It gathers personal information to empower AI agents — the next generation of AI assistants — to make recommendations and suggestions suited to your behavior and tastes.

Phones coming out with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will be the first mobile devices to use a new video codec, Advanced Professional Video, that enables taking near lossless-quality footage as well as more granular controls in post-production for precise color grading, Qualcomm says. The chip has a fully computational video pipeline, meaning phones can extract single frames from videos with the same visual quality as still images.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 uses Qualcomm’s X85 modem along with the company’s FastConnect 7900 connectivity chip, with Wi-Fi 7 and AI that leads to up to 40% power savings as well as optimizing Wi-Fi for 50% lower latency for gaming.

At the end of the Snapdragon Summit’s product keynote, Qualcomm group general manager Alex Katouzian introduced another chip, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. Though he didn’t share many details, this chip will be for slightly less premium phones (though still more capable than the Snapdragon 7 line of silicon) and take the place of the «S» sub-series of chips, like the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 released last year.