Snapdragon 8 Plus Ready To Shake By The End Of 2025! Affordable Price Flagship Performance?

Snapdragon 8 Plus is ready to launch in the fourth quarter of 2025 (photo: x @SumahoReview)

JAKARTA - Qualcomm has again become a hot topic of conversation with the latest leaks about a new chip dubbed 'Snapdragon 8 Plus.' This chip is reportedly ready to launch in the fourth quarter of 2025 as a real alternative for Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 which will fill the list of the most premium Android phones next year.

Known internally with the SM8845 code, the Snapdragon 8 Plus is touted as a solution to the premium-midrange market that longs for high performance without having to pay flagship prices.

Interestingly, this chip is not the direct successor to the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, but is a new class that stands alone, designed to bridge the gap between the true flagship line and the upper middle class segment.

Meanwhile, Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will remain Qualcomm's flagship chip for 2025. Designed with the 3nm fabrication process of TSMC and equipped with a custom Oryon CPU, this chip is predicted to bring a big leap in terms of performance and power efficiency.

Phones like the Galaxy S26 Ultra are believed to be the main home for Elite 2 but preliminary news shows that the price could be even higher than its already expensive predecessors.

This is the gap that will be filled by Snapdragon 8 Plus. Although there are no official specifications yet, this chip is expected to bring the same GPU architecture as Elite 2, but at a much more pocket-friendly price. This strategy has the potential to encourage the re-emergence of a flagship killer' smartphone that offers extraordinary performance at a more reasonable price.

More interestingly, phones powered by Snapdragon 8 Plus are rumored to have a jumbo battery of up to 7,000mAh, much larger than conventional flagships that use Elite 2. This will be a huge added value for users who want extraordinary battery life without compromising performance.

For the record, Qualcomm previously introduced the Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 as a saving version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. However, with the presence of 8s Gen 4, the strategy shifted slightly because its performance was only equivalent to last year's flagship.

Now, with the Snapdragon 8 Plus, Qualcomm appears to be redesigning a chipset competition map, creating a new path that might determine the end of the 2025 smartphone trend.