The Snapdragon 8 Elite, announced last year, was a huge bet for Qualcomm, and it turned out to be a massive success. The powerful Oryon cores, combined with 3nm cutting-edge technology, delivered massive performance and efficiency gains. It’s still one of the fastest mobile chipsets.
Pushing the limits even further, Qualcomm is already working on its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2, and early leaks suggest promising upgrades. The chip is also arriving a month earlier, which means we’ll see devices launching with this chip sooner than ever before. Here’s everything we know about the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2.
Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 release date
Qualcomm will announce the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 at the Snapdragon Summit 2025, scheduled to take place on September 23. That’s a month earlier than its usual timeline, and Qualcomm isn’t alone in here — its biggest rival, MediaTek, is also reportedly pushing up the announcement to showcase Dimensity 9500 even earlier in September.
Not to forget, Apple will also unveil its latest iPhones in the same month, powered by a new A19 chipset. So, September is going to be an extremely busy month, and I’m very excited to see how these chips stack up against each other.
Although the official announcement is still weeks away, leaks and benchmarks have already revealed numerous details about the upcoming Snapdragon flagship, as detailed in the following sections.
Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 specs
Qualcomm will reportedly use TSMC’s enhanced 3nm (N3P) process for the manufacturing of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2. Several reports also surfaced online suggesting a Samsung-made (2nm) Snapdragon 8 Elite in the pipeline, but it is not ready for mass production just yet, according to a reliable leaker, Digital Chat Station.
The second-generation Snapdragon 8 Elite is said to feature ARMv9 architecture, supporting advanced instructions such as SME1 and SVE2. As for the CPU cores, Qualcomm will likely stick to the same core cluster, featuring two prime Oryon cores and six performance Oryon cores.
Qualcomm will reportedly use the third-generation Oryon CPU cores in the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 chip. The 8 Elite features the second-generation Oryon core, whereas the first-generation core was used in the Snapdragon X Elite (for PC).
According to recent leaks, the 8 Elite 2 may hit 4.6GHz of peak frequency for its regular model, and a whopping 4.74GHz for the “for Galaxy” variant that Samsung will be using in the Galaxy S26 series early next year. That’s a nice jump from Snapdragon 8 Elite’s 4.32GHz, combined with performance upgrades on the third-gen Oryon CPU, will likely bring a considerable performance boost to the upcoming flagship.
The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 is leaked to feature an upgraded Adreno 840 GPU with around a 30% performance boost. The GPU is said to be clocked at up to 1.2GHz and may feature increased independent cache (likely GMEM) from 12MB to 16MB for faster graphics rendering. It could bring support for LPDDR5X/LPDDR6 memory.
Here’s a spec sheet based on the leaked details:
| Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 specs | |
|---|---|
| Announcement | September 23, 2025 |
| Process node | 3nm |
| Manufacturer | TSMC |
| CPU | octa-core |
| CPU cores | 2 x prime cores (Oryon) 6 x performance cores (Oryon) |
| GPU | Adreno 840 |
Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 benchmarks
While there have been no benchmark leaks as yet, reliable tipster Digital Chat Station has something to share with us. According to him, Qualcomm’s next flagship SoC will achieve a single-core score over 4,000 and a multi-core score over 11,000.
For reference, the Snapdragon 8 Elite scores around 3,100 and 9,800 in single-core and multi-core, respectively. This translates to an improvement of about 25-30% in single-core and 10-15% in multi-core for the newer flagship. These are not huge gains, but not less than impressive for a year-over-year upgrade.
The same tipster also believes that the 8 Elite 2 could surpass the 4 million AnTuTu mark. If that’s true, it would be an astonishing achievement for Qualcomm. For reference, the Snapdragon 8 Elite only manages around 2.8 million.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 — especially when it comes to the camera, connectivity, and NPU upgrades. Hopefully, more details will emerge soon, and I’ll update this article as they do.
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