(Image credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm has unveiled the new chips that are going to power the next generation of phones in 2026 and while the performance promises are exciting, there's more than a little confusion about the naming of the new chip.

As I explained recently, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 has been named to fit back into the Snapdragon 8 family, after Qualcomm decided to ditch the "Gen" designation for its first Elite chip last year.

So, instead of calling the new hardware Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, it instead takes that Elite label and adds it to Gen 5.

That might be confusing but makes it easy to see how hardware sits alongside other products. For example, if you have a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, you know that Gen 5 is more recent, whereas Elite Gen 2 would have no natural home in the line-up and incomparable to other products.

Now Qualcomm has confirmed during its Snapdragon Summit that it's going to introduce a non-Elite Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 platform in the coming months, too. And while it didn't confirm the specs of the new hardware, it has previously told us that "Elite" means that it's the top Snapdragon hardware, so removing the Elite name, means it's a tier down.

This perfectly demonstrates how the naming to going to work as the company tiers its products.

(Image credit: Future / Chris Hall)

This all means that Qualcomm's tiered flagship hardware line-up will include the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, the latter a lower tier, for devices that will have a lower price in the sub-flagship category.

This is nothing new: for many years Qualcomm has produced flagship hardware and then a couple of months later, produced a lower tier offering that goes into cheaper phones.

In 2025, this made no sense, because it was the Snapdragon 8 Elite (in the OnePlus 13, for example) and then the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 (in the Nothing Phone 3) – these look like two totally unrelated products.

During a Q&A session behind closed doors at Snapdragon Summit, Alex Katouzian, general manager mobile, compute and XR at Qualcomm, confirmed that Snapdragon 8s would evolve into this new tier.

While we're a couple of months away from any new hardware announcements, that's likely to mean that there will be no Snapdragon 8s Gen 5, because it's just called Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 instead.

It's expected that Xiaomi will officially reveal the first phone to use the new Elite hardware today – in the form of the Xiaomi 17 series. It's unlikely we'll see a Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 phone announcement until 2026.