Qualcomm revealed its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip in September to power the absolute top-tier Android phones coming out in 2026. The $900 OnePlus 15 launched this month and is the first phone available with the new chip in the US. Now, the company is offering a new chip -- the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 -- for handsets that need slightly less digital horsepower for lower cost, leading to cheaper but still powerful phones.

Qualcomm typically offers multiple versions of its chips at varying performance levels and prices to suit the needs of phone-makers. Even within the cream of the crop -- phones that cost $700 or more -- companies may opt for a less powerful and, presumably, a less expensive chip to power their lower-priced devices. This could include phones like the just-announced OnePlus 15R, which doesn't have a price but follows other R-series handsets that have slightly less impressive specs and cost less than their premium siblings.

The new Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 has a complex lineage, but Qualcomm sees it as a follow-up to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, released in 2023 -- which is why the company only released comparable figures to that 2023 chip. The major upgrade between the two is that the new 8 Gen 5 has the company's proprietary Oryon central processing unit with 36% improved performance and 42% better power efficiency compared to the 8 Gen 3. Comparably, the new chip's graphics processing unit has 11% greater performance and 28% better power efficiency than its predecessor's GPU. 

The Oryon CPU in the 8 Gen 5 enables the AI agent features, like contextual suggestions based on personal data, that debuted in last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite phone chip and have continued in the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The company introduced the "Elite" moniker to brand them as the new highest bar for performance. The 8 Gen 5's CPU reaches speeds of 3.8GHz, while the 8 Elite Gen 5 reaches up to 4.6GHz, showing a clear gap in capability -- but other than that, Qualcomm didn't release performance figures for how the 8 Gen 5 compares to its even higher-end chip sibling.

Regardless, the 8 Gen 5 will power flagship phones from companies like OnePlus, Qualcomm said in a press release. The first devices using the chip will launch in the coming weeks, which likely includes the OnePlus 15R that the phone-maker confirmed will launch on Dec. 17. OnePlus' R-series phones have been slightly less powerful than their flagship counterparts but have been priced lower as a result. For instance, the OnePlus 13R (powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) released back in January was less powerful than the OnePlus 13 but also $300 cheaper at launch.