Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 To Launch On 26 November, But Only In China First

Yes, you read that correctly – that is Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, not the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that now spearheads Android flagship smartphones. This new chipset will first debut in China on 26 November, as announced by Qualcomm’s official Weibo page.

Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Launching Next Week

With the number now thrown downward to play second fiddle to the Elite-branded models, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 chipset will, for the most part, be constructed similarly but with lower clock speeds overall. Qualcomm has at least confirmed during the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s launch that the Prime and Performance cores are clocked at 3.8GHz and 3.32GHz respectively, lower than Elite’s 4.6GHz and 3.62GHz figures.

However, the exact core configuration wasn’t confirmed up until this point – while it was initially thought to be 1X+7P layout, famed leaker Digital Chat Station reported that it’ll stick to Elite’s 2X+6P configuration, though GPU is the Adreno 829 which is slightly slower than the flagship. As Notebookcheck pointed out, this is Qualcomm’s first non-flagship chipset to adopt its in-house Oryon cores, as opposed to off-the-shelf Arm Cortex designs that powered the second-in-line from the previous generation, the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4.

Since Qualcomm only mentions China-only launch for now, the first wave of devices to see this chipset is naturally going to be some Chinese exclusives. Amongst them include OnePlus Ace 6T, Moto X70 Ultra, along with new devices from vivo (and its subsidiary iQOO). Everyone else outside of China will likely have to wait for some time before seeing this new variant powering global-bound smartphones, but until then, the first wave of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 smartphones are arriving in Malaysia soon.

Pokdepinion: Should be still plenty fast, despite slower clockspeeds.