qualcomm has announced its new flagship snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 processor for mobile devices. the main differences between this chip and its predecessor are significant performance improvements and expanded support for modern ai capabilities.
the snapdragon 8 elite gen 5 is manufactured using tsmc's 3nm n3p process and features two "large" cores clocked at up to 4.6 ghz, as well as six performance cores (clocked at up to 3.62 ghz).
the company claims that compared to the previous generation, the new product offers up to 20% higher performance and up to 35% improved energy efficiency. this flagship chip supports up to 24 gb of ram and 4k displays with a refresh rate of 120 hz.
the upgraded adreno 840 gpu (clocked at up to 1.2 ghz) offers 23% higher performance and 20% lower power consumption. additionally, optimizations for opengl es 3.2, opencl 3.0 fp, and vulkan 1.3 have been announced, along with support for hardware decoding of h.265/vp9/av1 and hdr10+, hdr10, hlg, and dolby vision.
the performance of the hexagon neural engine has also been improved (up to 37% higher than the previous generation). at the same time, the spectra image processor is the first processor in the mobile market to support the advanced professional video codec——a potential alternative to apple's prores.
additionally, this soc includes the qualcomm x85 5g modem (supporting mmwave and sub-6ghz frequencies) and the fastconnect 7900 network chip (wi-fi 7 and bluetooth 6.0).
the processor will soon appear in flagship smartphones from various brands.
