Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 Tipped For 5GHz And A Huge Lift For Flagship Phones

Android handset fans have been chomping at the bit for news on this year's various upcoming flagship chipsets, and the rumor mill produced a fine bit of info. According to known leaker Digital Chat Station (DCS), flagship-level Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 chips are being tested at a whopping 5GHz. Grab the salt shaker as these are rumors, but they're darn tasty.

This is the latest in a series of purported leaks from DCS about the new chip, after they claimed that it could offer as much as a 30% performance boost over its predecessor. The rumor-mill earlier stated a "theoretical" GeekBench single-core score of 4,000+ points, and a multi-core score of 11,000+. Those figures are already around 25% and 10% higher than the extant Snapdragon 8 Elite, respectively, so quite the generational boost if they're indicative of final silicon.

However, that bit of cake might get a very explosive cherry on top thanks to a claim that Qualcomm's testing the Gen 2 at a nice, round, fat 5GHz. While DCS themselves remark that these are validation frequencies, meaning that chips inside phones or tablet likely won't clock that high due to thermal and/or power constraints, it's still quite an impressive feat, especially if the clock speed boost applies on top of those theoretical IPC improvements. All told, we could be looking at a generational bump with both hefty single- and multi-threaded performance uplifts, an impressive feat in these days of silicon diminishing returns.

The chip is claimed to be manufactured with TSMC's 3-nm N3P process, and if the rumors pan out, it could carry 32MB of L2 cache, a higher-clocked Adreno 840 GPU (compared to the Gen 1 chip), and LPDDR6 memory support. Qualcomm must be feeling quite bullish on the new SoC, as it's recently moved the reveal of the new chip up to September 23, around the same time frame as Pixel and iPhone devices are released.