We haven’t even heard something stable in regards to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 smartphone chip but – hold your eyes peeled for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit on 23 September – however we’re already receiving some fascinating details about its potential successor.
In response to established tech tipster Digital Chat Station, Qualcomm’s late 2026 flagship chip – codenamed the Qualcomm SM8950 – will are available in two distinct flavours.
With the transfer to a brand new TSMC 2nm course of, the price of manufacturing is predicted to soar. That elevated worth will should be handed onto the units themselves, supposedly resulting in a two-tiered strategy.
The leaker likens this to the present scenario with Apple’s iPhone vary. At current, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus run on the Apple A18 chip, whereas the iPhone 16 Professional and iPhone 16 Professional Max run on the extra highly effective A18 Professional.
The Professional has the identical CPU because the non-Professional chip, however with extra cache. It additionally options an additional GPU core.
Apple
Two-tiered 2027
With this cost-induced break up, we will possible look ahead to a Samsung Galaxy S27 operating on the lesser ‘non-Professional’ model of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 3 (no matter it seems to be known as), whereas the Samsung Galaxy S27 Extremely runs on the full-fat variant.
After all, subsequent yr’s Samsung Galaxy S26 vary can be tipped for its personal two-tier processor provision, although that’s set to be alongside regional somewhat than model-based traces.
Regardless of the case, it appears possible that the times of efficiency parity from the £800/$800 class proper as much as the £1,300/$1,300 uber-flagship class (and certainly into the £1,800/$1,800 foldable class) are nearly up. There’s an entire new efficiency tier incoming.
Nord switches to Snapdragon
In different Snapdragon information, the primary benchmark scores for the OnePlus Nord 5 have seemingly leaked on-line – and so they’re very encouraging certainly.
Evidently somewhat than the MediaTek Dimensity 9400e chip that had been rumoured for OnePlus’s subsequent mid-ranger, it’ll run on a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 as a substitute. We’ve seen this earlier than within the Honor 200 Professional and the Motorola Edge 50 Extremely, and it’s a really succesful runner – particularly for a mid-range telephone.
Positive sufficient, a single-core rating of 1,977 and a multi-core rating of 5,090 handily beats the Pixel 9a, a minimum of in line with our testing.