Sure, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 looks like a powerful chip — but there's a bigger feature it could unleash for Android phones

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 announced by Qualcomm this week is certainly a powerful chip, and I've got the benchmarks to prove it. Thanks to improvements covering the CPU and GPU on the new chip, Qualcomm's latest silicon races past the iPhone 17 Pro models and their A19 Pro system-on-chip in many key tests, suggesting you're in for some impressive performance should you buy one of the Android phones that uses the newest Snapdragon chip in the coming months.

And yet, as impressive as the early benchmarks are, that's not what grabs my attention when I look at the full scope of improvements Qualcomm is promising for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Rather, it's promised AI improvements that make this system-on-chip a potential standout.

Specifically, in its Snapdragon 8 Elite marketing material, Qualcomm touts "truly personalized agentic AI assistants to take user- tailored actions across apps." We haven't heard too much in the way of specifics during this week's Snapdragon Summit, which I'm attending at Qualcomm's invitation. But it sounds an awful lot like the cross-app actions that made Samsung's Galaxy S25 phones stand out are about to get more powerful — and maybe even appear on other Android phones running Qualcomm's latest silicon.

If so, that's a big step forward that will have a lasting impact beyond the gains we can expect from the CPU and GPU on board the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

Why cross-app actions rule

If you haven't had a chance to use cross-app actions on the latest Galaxy phones, here's how it works in a nutshell. You can aske the Gemini assistant to perform multiple tasks that cut across different apps with just one command. As an example, you might ask the assistant to look up information about a magazine's location and hours, text that information to a friend and then create a calendar entry for the day you plan on visiting. With cross-app actions, you can handle that all at once.

A lot of AI features on phones can feel like gimmicks, but cross-app actions is truly useful, simplifying a task that used to take multiple steps across different apps. It's easily my favorite thing about the Galaxy S25.

I don't know if other Android phones are going to follow Samsung's lede, but it certainly sounds like the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 gives them both the horsepower and cognitive power to do so. In addition to the improved speed that the chipset's 3rd-generation Chyron CPU brings to the table, the redesigned Hexagon neural processing unit is 37% faster while also improving performance per watt by 16%.

That means the NPU is able to do more calculations faster while consuming less power — just the sort of thing you need to have if you're going to be turning to more AI agents to handle tasks on your phone.

"It's how that power translates into seamless AI features that feel natural, intuitive and genuinely useful," said Alex Katouzian, group general manager of mobile, compute and XR at Qualcomm, when talking about the Hexagon improvements during the launch of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 silicon yesterday (September 24).

Other parts of the new system-on-chip will play a part in powering more AI-based agents localized on your phone and ready to do your bidding. The Qualcomm Sensing Hub — a Snapdragon mainstay that serves as a low-power, always-on system that's constantly (and securely) collecting data about you and your surroundings that it can act upon — gets updated with a Personal Scribe feature with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It's designed to build a knowledge graph about you so that AI agents can do their thing.

What better AI means for Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 — and beyond

"We're really in the agentic AI era right now," said Cindy Lei, who led development on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Still, it sounds to me that exactly what kind of agentic AI features users can expect will depend on phone makers who turn to the new chip and developers who tweak their apps to support it.

However, Vinesh Sukumar — Qualcomm's vice president of artificial intelligence — described his ideal agentic AI feature based on what's available on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. He'd like an AI agent that would be aware of when he was responsible for school carpool duties and not only remind him when it was his turn to do the driving but also adjust the schedule in his calendar to reflect the different times when he should leave the office for pickups.

And frankly, that sounds a lot like cross-app actions.

But Qualcomm's ambitions for AI extend beyond just on-device features, as evidenced by the "AI is the new UI" mantra that's been a theme of a lot of Snapdragon Summit presentations. Eventually, Qualcomm sees AI working across devices — all powered by Snapdragon silicon, of course — with the right device stepping in at appropriate stages of a task.

An example provided by Katouzian involved a person wearing smart glasses and carrying a phone who happens to see a shirt they like. With a prompt, the glasses can snap a picture of that shirt and send it to the phone, with an AI agent on the phone looking for the shirt on retail sites, finding it in your size and placing it in a virtual shopping cart for you to complete the purchase at your leisure.

That's not something that's going to happen immediately now that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is finding its way into phones. But Qualcomm executives suggest that such a scenario isn't that far off either.

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