Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Name Confirmed for Qualcomm's Upcoming Flagship Processor

A few weeks back, the prospect of Qualcomm adopting a new naming strategy for the upcoming flagship Snapdragon processor was floating around. Now, the new name change confirmation has officially landed from the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Qualcomm himself.

Don McGuire, Qualcomm's Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, has officially confirmed that the successor to the 2024 Snapdragon 8 Elite will be officially called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. This new chipset will power the next wave of top-of-the-line flagship Android smartphones in 2025 and beyond.

He claims that while this might seem as if Qualcomm "skipped generations", that is not the case. The 8 Elite Gen 5 simply will denote that this is the fifth generation of the 8 series processor within the brand's portfolio. It pays homage to the debut Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor and carries forward the lineage with the 8 Elite Gen 5. It will become the second-generation Qualcomm 8 Elite chipset.

"Think of it like this: Gen 5 isn’t just a number. It’s a signal that this platform leads the family forward," McGuire states. He further added that the reason why the next SoC also carries the "Elite" moniker is that the "platform truly does deliver elite experiences". He has further added that the "Elite" branding is reserved for only Qualcomm's industry-leading products, denoting "those that push boundaries in capability, experience and innovation. It’s not just a name. It’s a promise."

Additionally, according to the Chief Marketing Officer, this new naming strategy will help consumers and smartphone manufacturers better understand the current product roadmap and helps Qualcomm create a simplified and self-explanatory product portfolio.

That said, while we might not get the expected "Snapdragon 8 Elite 2" branding for the next breakthrough SoC from Qualcomm, we can expect it to deliver on the "Elite" promise. It recently surfaced on Antutu with over 4 million points, indicating a whopping 56% gain over the Snapdragon 8 Elite. 

It is said to be a TSMC-fabricated 3 nm chipset with an octa-core architecture. The chipset will allegedly consist of 2x prime Oryon cores and 6x performance Oryon cores. On the GPU front, there could be the Adreno 840 paired with LPDDR5X / LPDDR6 memory.

While McGuire has not revealed any of the key details of the SoC, we expect all curtains to lift on September 23, at the 2025 edition of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit.