Think the Snapdragon 8 Elite is a beast? It could have been overclocked.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite processor is shaping up to be a massive leap forward for flagship Android phones in theory. Qualcomm’s new smartphone chip has a custom CPU featuring an impressive 4.32GHz clock speed, but the company now says it could’ve offered even more performance.

Qualcomm previously told Android Authority that it designs chips with the best user experience in mind and then hopes the benchmarks beat rival processors. But would the company ever release a flagship chipset with benchmarks that underperform against competitors? 

Android Authority’s C Scott Brown posed this question to Snapdragon 8 Elite project lead Shahin Farahani:

It’s happening already today. We can optimize for an even higher benchmark and sacrifice real-life use cases. So you can focus on thermally limited (sic), or you can push the benchmarks higher. So we are choosing to make sure that the end-user experience is the first focus rather than just eking up a little bit more on the benchmarks. So at some level, it is happening now.

In other words, Farahani suggests there’s still scope for even higher peak performance and clock speeds but that Qualcomm has chosen to optimize for battery life and sustained performance. That’s not a surprise as all smartphone chipmakers have to strike a fine balance between peak performance, sustained performance, and battery life. 

Nevertheless, Qualcomm has offered higher-clocked versions of its flagship chips in the last couple of years, namely the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chips. These overclocked chips were initially exclusive to Samsung before being released to other OEMs later. So don’t be surprised to see a faster Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in 2025.

Disclosure: C Scott Brown is a guest of Qualcomm at the Snapdragon Summit. Qualcomm had no influence over Android Authority’s editorial coverage.