If early milestones are to be believed, new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite it’s a serious workhorse that easily beats current Android and even Apple smartphones. Obviously, this will make other silicon developers worried. Samsung is rumored to be rushing to secure more chips for the Galaxy S25for example, possibly because it wants to guarantee the absolute best performance for all its next-gen flagships.

While we’re still waiting to see if the 8 Elite performs as well as promised on future consumer phones, even a few percentage points down will still leave high-end Snapdragon-powered phones well ahead of most competitors. This could cause quite a shift in the industry.

For several years now, the Android chipset market has largely been a case of Snapdragon and “the rest”. It’s not that rival players like MediaTek and Samsung have produced massively inferior chips; performance and feature comparisons were often relatively close, and Qualcomm wasn’t always first with new features in the industry. However, partnerships and sales volume, and to some extent public perception, have tilted heavily in Qualcomm’s favor for most of the past decade. It’s hard to name many recent flagship smartphones that aren’t powered by Snapdragon.

It reports that Samsung is once again looking for enough chips to power its Galaxy S series exclusively with Snapdragon 8 Elite highlights two key aspects. First, Samsung Foundry’s production yields are once again rumored to be struggling, resulting in far too few suitable chips from its cutting-edge manufacturing process. We first saw signs of problems with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which was manufactured on Samsung Foundry’s 4nm node. The chip suffered from high temperature and performance throttling issues, which were apparently fixed by switching to TSMC’s rival node for the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. Samsung’s 4nm Exynos 2200 received an even more mixed reception.

In the following year, The Samsung Galaxy S23 series has become Snapdragon only for the first time. Although this was disguised as a strategic partnership, the return to a mixed chipset strategy with the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus pretty much confirms that Samsung’s Exynos 2300 either wasn’t competitive enough or Samsung Foundry was still suffering from performance issues.

Cutting-edge silicon manufacturing is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive. The Exynos 2500 is supposed to be Samsung’s showcase for its latest manufacturing process. If it doesn’t materialize in the S25 series, rival TSMC will have the only commercial 3nm mobile chips on the market, and the manufacturing monopoly doesn’t bode well for capacity or pricing. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is already reported to be much more expensive than its predecessor.

We don’t know if manufacturing is the reason behind Exynos’ reported demise. It is not certain that the chip is gone either; it could be for another Galaxy FE phone or tablet, for example. Still, that suggests that if Samsung can build chips, they aren’t necessarily close to being competitive with Snapdragon in key performance metrics, and that’s the second problem.

While classic performance metrics certainly aren’t everything these days, Samsung’s dual-chip approach makes it extremely vulnerable to performance differences between Arm Cortex CPU components and custom CPU developments from Qualcomm. Obviously, other players are also affected. MediaTek size has pushed the boat on elaborate high-core processor setups to establish itself as a performance leader and has scored some recent wins in China such as the vivo X200 and X200 Pro. However, their Ultra counterpart still opts for Snapdragon. Even so, with the 8 Elite bringing in massive 40% gains, it will almost certainly catch the eye of every manufacturer looking to sell peak performance in late 2024/25.

This leaves rivals like MediaTek and Samsung in an awkward position. Do they continue to rely on Arm’s Cortex program to provide relatively easy CPU development and hope that the next generation or two will catch up, or are they also going the riskier custom CPU route in an attempt to close the gap with Qualcomm? All the big players have probably long appreciated the potential for custom kernels, but development is expensive, time-consuming, and has no guarantee of success. Samsung has had dubious results with its custom Mongoose kernel, after all. Qualcomm gave itself a big advance when it paid $1.4 billion for Nuvia in 2021providing it with the building blocks for its custom processor developments now found in the Snapdragon X and 8 Elite.

Even though we see more custom CPUs on the market in the coming years, this still doesn’t address the graphics or custom silicon AI discrepancies. Of course, Qualcomm could be beaten on price, but its rivals haven’t had success with this strategy so far, and there are no marketing wins to be had by settling for second place anyway.

Perhaps as much of a problem as Samsung’s Exynos program is Google’s Pixel. As we know all too well, Google’s Tensor processor already lags behind the competition in every measure except AI. Benchmarks suggest that the 8 Elite could double the performance of Google’s current flagship Pixel 9 series in CPU and GPU performance, leaving them already looking positive, especially for mobile gamers. The The G5 tensor nor does it shape up to be a particularly ambitious chip, although it will be a bigger leap than The G4 tensor. Google’s pace of progress is slow, to put it bluntly, and it’s only looking to shake off the heavy design assistance provided by Samsung’s semiconductor division.

Already, the picture is taking shape; buy Snapdragon if you want maximum performance and stick with Tensor if you want first access to Google’s AI tools. But how long can a brand rely on tiny bits of custom software to bridge what’s clearly an ever-widening chasm between its flagship chips and the rest of the Android ecosystem? I’d bet not much. Enthusiasts – the quintessential Pixel consumer – will be looking closely at the hardware on the other side of the fence.

While Google’s more siled and in-house development has protected it from what I call the “Snapdragon effect,” it relies on AI tools as a consistent differentiator. However, it is far from clear that consumers are so interested in this technological buzzword. Internally, Google will be acutely aware of the performance discrepancy and likely planning for a contingency. According to documents seen by Android AuthorityGoogle is working on a custom CPU core called Orion that could debut with the Tensor G6 or, more likely, later chipsets. Whether this will be hyper-competitive with what Qualcomm and others are producing by 2026/2027 is anyone’s guess. Maybe Google will eventually go back to Snapdragon if the pressure gets too much.

All that said, I definitely don’t want to oversell the Snapdragon 8 Elite. We haven’t gotten our hands on consumer phones yet, and price and power efficiency will be just as important as the chip’s performance potential. Find any of these and we’ll have a very different discussion about Qualcomm’s CPU choices in a few weeks.

That said, the currently broad market for Android mobile processors has been held in its delicate balance by two key factors that are undeniably under threat – relatively small performance differences between chips and a choice of competitive manufacturing partners. Unless the industry takes a collective step back and realizes that maybe top-end performance isn’t that important to modern smartphones anymore, it’s increasingly likely that Snapdragon’s already tight grip on the flagship market will it might finally kill a few of those who persist. alternatives. That, or maybe Arm will end Qualcomm’s custom CPU project before running off with the prize.