Qualcomm is bringing its most powerful smartphone chipset to date, and this time, there’s two of them: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 are both designed for “delivering agentic AI experiences that are immediate, personal, and adaptive,” according to Chris Patrick, SVP & GM of Mobile Handsets at Qualcomm.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6
The 2nm-based Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 packs the most powerful Oryon processors from the chipmaker, packing two 5.0GHz Prime cores plus six 4.0GHz Performance cores; they get paired with 16MB of Oryon FlexCache and up to 24GB of LPDDR5X/LPDDR6 RAM at speeds up to 10667MT/s, plus support for even faster UFS 5.0 storage. On the GPU side, there’s the new Adreno Neural Fusion technology, which integrates matrix compute into the GPU pipeline for accelerated AI features, such as upscaling and frame generation.
All told, the chipset is 13% faster in the CPU department, 37% more power-efficient, while GPU is 44% faster and 40% more efficient, whereas the NPU is 35% faster and 33% more efficient than Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
The chipset also features Qualcomm X105 Modem-RF system and FastConnect 8800 module respectively responsible for the claimed 14.8Gbps peak download via 5G or 11.6Gbps peak via Wi-Fi (now with 4×4 MIMO support); camera performance also sees an upgrade, with Advanced Professional Video (APV) support and Intelligent Pixel Control intended to improve scene recognition and produce more natural-looking photos and videos.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6
Meanwhile, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is mostly the same as the Elite Extreme counterpart, only that it lacks APV capture, no matrix compute in the Adreno GPU pipeline, and no H.266 (VVC) codec support. Despite claiming the same CPU clock speeds, its first-party figures suggests that the CPU is slightly slower in comparison, so we suspect TDP may be at play here. Note that there is some discrepancy in claimed NPU performance as well.
Availability
Devices built on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 are expected from HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMI, RedMagic, Samsung, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE, with rollout timing to be confirmed by individual manufacturers.
Pokdepinion: First Elite, now Elite Extreme, what’s next?
