Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2: A Glimpse into Qualcomm's Next Flagship Chipset
Qualcomm is set to carry forward the legacy of its flagship smartphone SoCs upon the foundations built by its in-house production of Oryon cores. Following the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the next-generation chipset is around the corner, now carrying a new name: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2. Ahead of its official unveiling, which is rumored to happen on September 23, this is a breakdown of the key information known so far about the upcoming silicon.
Explanation of the New Naming Scheme
The name change to "Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2" possibly forms part of a bigger strategy by Qualcomm to rationalize its product portfolio. This will also allow it to develop a tiered system in a future date that could give rise to a more inferior non-elite Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and another less powerful Snapdragon 8s Gen2 for application in 2026, thus clearly classifying the hierarchy of chipsets.
Core Architecture and Fabrication Technology
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 will undergo incremental but important improvements in core design and manufacturing.
- Lithography: The chipset is expected to mass-produce with TSMC's 3nm 'N3P' node. However, this process offers a 5% performance increase at the same power level or a 5-10% energy saving at the same speed over the 'N3E' process used for the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
- CPU Cluster: It will most likely follow the same '2 + 6' structure for Oryon cores. The performance cores on the standard version should run at about 4.61GHz with six efficiency cores clocked at 3.63GHz. A higher-binned version meant for Samsung devices such as the Galaxy S26 Edge could ramp up the performance core to 4.74GHz.
- GPU: The new Adreno 840 GPU is said to have a default frequency of 1.20GHz, 0.10GHz higher than that of Adreno 830 in the previous generation.
Cache and AI Receive Major Upgrades
Loyal sources are bringing news of significant upgrades on the cache side and at the Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
- Cache-wise, the total L2 and L3 cache is being said to increase from 24MB to 32MB (16MB each).
- NPU Performance: This NPU may provide up to 100 TOPS (Trillion of Operations Per Second). To provide context, if true, this would be more than double the 45 TOPS NPU in the Snapdragon X Elite, which is a massive gaming leap for a smartphone SoC if true.
Leaked Performances and Benchmarks
Early leaks indicate massive performance improvements. An alleged Geekbench 6 listing for the Galaxy S26 Edge, even with the performance cores down clocked to 4.00 GHz, either eked out the performance of or outright defeated the original Snapdragon 8 Elite. Another rumor purports that Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 has vastly better gaming performance for less power than the one before it.
Yet another report suggests that power consumption could be near equivalent but performance improvements are app-dependent. Reportedly, AnTuTu scoring puts this chipset at over 4 million points, far ahead of any Snapdragon 8 Elite-device with the best scores.
A combination of TSMC's refined 3nm technology and Qualcomm's second-generation Oryon cores indicates that a strong new entrant should perform much better in all respects than the present Snapdragon 8 Elite.
