Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5: Fastest CPU but at What Cost?

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The first wave of benchmarks for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s engineering sample confirms that Qualcomm prioritized extreme performance, making it now the fastest mobile CPU. However, this achievement came with a significant trade-off in efficiency; the new chipset consumes 61 percent more power than the A19 Pro.

### New Compute Performance Comparison
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is 22.5 percent faster than its predecessor but only 4.5 percent faster compared to Apple’s A19 Pro, indicating that Qualcomm is closing the gap slowly. In multi-core performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 excels, being 22.5 percent faster than the previous generation and securing a score of 12,546. Yet, it must draw 19.5W to outperform the A19 Pro’s 12.1W.

### Performance per Watt
The A19 Pro leads in efficiency by achieving 913.55 points per watt, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 manages only 643.38 points per watt. The Dimensity 9500 scores even lower at 595.33 points per watt.

### Conclusion
While the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is unmatched in raw multi-core performance, it falls short in efficiency compared to Apple’s A19 Pro. Retail units are expected to offer improved efficiency.

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October 8, 2025

In summary, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 prioritizes speed at a significant power cost, making its efficiency relatively poor when compared to other top-tier chipsets.