Qualcomm is scheduled to host its Snapdragon Summit event on September 23, and according to rumors, there will not just be a single top-end chipset launch that will power premium smartphones of 2026. Alongside the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, we could be greeted by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, a less capable silicon that shares several attributes of its older brother, and it is possible that its single-core and multi-core scores were posted in the latest benchmark leak. What is interesting is that the REDMAGIC 11 Pro was a part of the database, and it could be the first time the company decides not to use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 for one of its releases.
Performance cores of the alleged Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 running in the REDMAGIC 11 Pro are lower than the highest frequency recorded for the Snapdragon 8 Elite
Coming to the scores and specifications, the REDMAGIC 11 Pro obtains a single-core and multi-core score of 3,309 and 10,742, respectively, with Geekbench 6 showing that the device sports 16GB of RAM, with the two performance cores running at 4.20GHz, and six efficiency cores operating at 3.63GHz. The Snapdragon 8 Elite announced last year was running its performance cores at 4.32GHz, though the efficiency cores ran at a slower 3.53GHz. In short, the scores we are looking at right now are highly impressive considering the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is not a flagship-category silicon.
What is strange is that REDMAGIC allegedly chose the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 instead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, but that could be due to a cost issue, and the company probably believes that the non-flagship chipset offers a better’ price to performance.’ Also, thanks to Abhishek Yadav, we have learned that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is running at its maximum clock speeds, which is likely thanks to the superior cooling solution of the smartphone. We recently reported that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 was spotted running in Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Edge, with the device barely faster than the REDMAGIC 11 Pro.
However, before we conclude that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is the obvious choice, we must remind readers that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2’s performance cores were operating at 4.00GHz, whereas the default speeds were 4.74GHz, concluding that the chipset was not performing optimally. A closer look at the REDMAGIC 11 Pro’s specifications reveals that the smartphone is equipped with an Adreno 840 GPU, which is the same one expected to be paired with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 CPU.
In short, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 could just be a watered down flagship SoC that is mass produced on an advanced manufacturing process, but powering smartphones that offer customers exceptional value.
