Qualcomm has quietly listed an underpowered variant of its flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chip with one fewer Performance core.

The lower-tier offering comes as Qualcomm is rumored to be working on midrange and overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite variants.

When Qualcomm released the X series of processors, its most recent series of ARM processors for Windows laptops, our entire Digit team got excited as we believed we had finally found something that is close to Apple Silicon.

Samsung has revealed that the Galaxy S25 series is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, enjoying a few upgrades over the stock chip.

Qualcomm introduced its Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset in October last year, and the octa-core processor currently powers flagship devices from brands like Realme and OnePlus. Recently, the company quietly launched a new variant of the Snapdragon 8 Elite featuring seven cores.

Clamshell foldables should benefit the most from the binned Snapdragon 8 Elite due to their limited cooling capacity. All the best Android phones that have already launched or are due for release later this year will use Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.