Qualcomm explains why it keeps changing its premium Snapdragon name

Qualcomm has stepped out to give its own take on its upcoming premium flagship chipset that’s due for a launch later this month.

Just one week before its Snapdragon Summit 2025 (an annual three-day conference where it unveils major mobile and IoT hardware components), Qualcomm uploaded a blog post to explain why its incoming chipset is called the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite Gen 5.

Qualcomm’s best smartphone chipset has been going through rebrands in recent years, which can confuse people who are trying to buy the best bits but don’t follow too closely. 

Qualcomm explains

According to its blog post, 2026 marks the fifth year it has been sticking to its Snapdragon rebrand, which happened in 2022.

By following that logic, the existing Snapdragon 8 Elite you see inside your Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, Honor Magic7 Pro, Xiaomi 15 Ultra, Poco F7 Ultra, etc., is using the fourth generation of its Snapdragon 8-series mobile platform.

“By aligning with Gen 5, we’re reinforcing its leadership position and simplifying how consumers understand our product roadmap”, wrote Don McGuire, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Qualcomm.

It also addressed claims of previous name-changing by saying the Snapdragon 8 Elite was “an unprecedented moment in our (Qualcomm’s) roadmap”. The “Elite” suffix refers to the use of its in-house Oryon CPU, which is also explained in the blog post.

Besides seeing performance gains, using its own CPU design (which was hard-won, too) grants Qualcomm more control over its architectural layout and performance optimisation.

The name not only matters to end-users who read spec sheets when buying smartphones, but it also explains the product positioning to its list of (very large) customers with international market reach. One great example is Xiaomi, which will likely crash the Snapdragon keynote to announce the incoming Xiaomi 17 series handsets.

A stocktake of Snapdragon top chipsets

Between 2021 to 2025 alone, Qualcomm changed its premium flagship name at least three times. They are:

• 2021: Snapdragon 888 5G
• 2022: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (because of a major rebrand, mostly)
• 2023: Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (adds support for INT4 compute and AV1, on-device ray-tracing, etc.)
• 2024: Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 (adds support for multimodal generative AI)
• 2025: Snapdragon 8 Elite (in-house Oryon CPUs instead of Kyro ones)
• Upcoming: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Qualcomm’s rationale also strongly hinted that the premium mobile platform will be using in-house Oryon CPUs again, given that it’s reusing “Elite” in its naming convention.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2025 event begins on 23 September 2025 Hawaii Time (24 September 2025 Singapore Time).

Source: Qualcomm (QnQ Blog)