Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 die shot highlights minor upgrades and GPU improvements

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 posted some impressive results in first-party and independent benchmarks and even took the fight to Apple's A19 Pro. X user KurnalSalts has now posted a high-quality die shot of the SoC, and it shows minimal changes over the Snapdragon 8 Elite, effectively confirming that its performance gains mainly stemmed from architectural improvements.

The die shot also confirms the new Adreno 840 GPU's specs. Like its predecessor, it has six CUs. However, there are some significant under-the-hood changes, such as 6 MiB (Mebibytes) of on-chip memory (not VRAM) divided into 96 blocks. This is an upgrade from the Adreno 830, which had 64 MiB of on-chip memory with 64 blocks, and it will allow the SoC to be more power efficient because the GPU will need to access the DRAM less often.

Additionally, we can also see dedicated blocks for SME (Scalable Matrix Extension) next to the P-cores. Otherwise, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is similar to the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Its memory bus is still 64-bit, standard for smartphone SoCs. The chip has a die area of ~126.20 mm2, about the same as its last-gen counterpart.