Qualcomm has decided on a naming convention for its flagship mobile chipset that is pretty confusing as it is. As it turns out, things are going to be slightly more complicated, as the company has quietly released what it calls the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, V Series, or at least its product brief. And at a glance, it looks to be a slightly cut-down version of the standard 8 Elite chip.
Tagged with the model number SM8850-1-AB, the aforementioned product brief looks to be mostly the same as the standard Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, or the SM8850-5-AC. But the first of two key elements that separate the two chips is the number of slices. More specifically, the V Series model specifically mentions two slices at 1.2 GHz, while the average Adreno GPU has been sporting a three-slice architecture since the Adreno 830.
The second key element is the amount of Adreno High Performance memory (HPM) available on both chips. On the Snapdragon 8 Elite, V Series, Qualcomm mentions 12MB. But on the regular 8 Elite, it’s 18MB instead, lining up with each slice getting 4MB of HPM. The rest of the spec sheet looks to be identical between the two chipsets. This means the same Oryon CPU cores, the same modem, and the same NPU.
This Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, V Series can be considered a binned version of the standard 8 Elite chipset. That being said, it’s unclear if this is just the chipmaker salvaging a high number of chips that would otherwise not make the cut, or if there’s a specific niche it’s meant to fill. Either way, so far there is only one confirmed upcoming smartphone that will be using this chip, and it’s the Redmi K100 Pro that’s launching in China on 11 August.
(Source: Qualcomm [PDF], Weibo)
