We haven’t even heard anything solid about the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 smartphone chip yet – keep your eyes peeled for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit on 23 September – but we’re already receiving some fascinating information about its potential successor.
According to established tech tipster Digital Chat Station, Qualcomm’s late 2026 flagship chip – codenamed the Qualcomm SM8950 – will come in two distinct flavours.
With the move to a new TSMC 2nm process, the cost of production is predicted to soar. That increased price will need to be passed onto the devices themselves, supposedly leading to a two-tiered approach.
The leaker likens this to the current situation with Apple’s iPhone range. At present, the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus run on the Apple A18 chip, while the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max run on the more powerful A18 Pro.
The Pro has the same CPU as the non-Pro chip, but with more cache. It also features an extra GPU core.
Apple
Two-tiered 2027
With this cost-induced split, we can likely look forward to a Samsung Galaxy S27 running on the lesser ‘non-Pro’ version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 3 (whatever it turns out to be called), while the Samsung Galaxy S27 Ultra runs on the full-fat variant.
Of course, next year’s Samsung Galaxy S26 range is also tipped for its own two-tier processor provision, though that’s set to be along regional rather than model-based lines.
Whatever the case, it seems likely that the days of performance parity from the £800/$800 class right up to the £1,300/$1,300 uber-flagship class (and indeed into the £1,800/$1,800 foldable category) are almost up. There’s a whole new performance tier incoming.
Nord switches to Snapdragon
In other Snapdragon news, the first benchmark scores for the OnePlus Nord 5 have seemingly leaked online – and they’re very encouraging indeed.
It seems that rather than the MediaTek Dimensity 9400e chip that had been rumoured for OnePlus’s next mid-ranger, it’ll run on a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 instead. We’ve seen this before in the Honor 200 Pro and the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra, and it’s a very capable runner – especially for a mid-range phone.
Sure enough, a single-core score of 1,977 and a multi-core score of 5,090 handily beats the Pixel 9a, at least according to our testing.
