Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and 8 Elite Gen 6: 2nm process, 5GHz Oryon CPU
Qualcomm is having their annual Snapdragon Summit a little early this year, but that isn’t changing their usual plans of revealing the next generation of its flagship mobile system-on-chips: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6
Starting off with their halo chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 sets a new bar for Qualcomm, being the world’s first mobile CPU to hit the 5GHz mark. Built on a 2nm process node, it brings an 8-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU with two Prime cores boosting up to 5.0GHz, while its 6 Performance cores goes up to 4.0GHz.
There’s also 16MB of Oryon Flex Cache, a new cache architecture for heterogeneous cores to access the same dynamically allocated cache pool, while for memory it supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5X/6 along with UFS 5.0 storage.
Of course, there’s also a huge push on its AI capabilities, with a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU featuring a new Element Accelerator and the Qualcomm Sensing Hub with dual Micro NPUs. The Oryon CPU also helps with hardware-based AI acceleration, delivering what Qualcomm is calling their most advanced agentic AI yet. The ‘Extreme’ in particular has a 50% larger shared NPU memory footprint, letting it handle 30B+ parameter MoE models.
As for graphics, there’s a new Qualcomm Adreno Neural Fusion GPU with matrix cores, allowing for more efficient workloads, better graphics and faster frames, with the Extreme getting 18MB of dedicated Adreno High Performance Memory too.
Overall, Qualcomm is claiming 13% improved CPU performance, 44% improved GPU performance, 35% faster NPU performance, 37% better CPU power efficiency, 40% better GPU efficiency and 33% improved AI performance-per-watt; all of this is compared to the previous generation Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 of course.
As for connectivity, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 comes with a Qualcomm X105 5G Modem-RF and FastConnect 8800 Mobile Connectivity System for 5G-A, 5G mmWave, sub-6GHz, 5G-SA, Bluetooth 6.0, Thread 1.4, UWB and up to WiFi 802.11bn support.
Other features of note include a Spectra triple 20-bit AI-ISP with an Elite Color Engine for 3D LUT support, ‘cinema-grade’ footage with the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, and support for up to 8k60FPS and 4k240 super slow motion recording. There’s also the Snapdragon Sound suite of course, now with AI-enhanced audio separation and voice filtering, while on-device display support peaks at 4K+ at 120Hz with up to 8K external display support.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6
As for the non-Extreme Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, you’re actually looking at a fairly similar chip. You’ll still get the same 5GHz Oryon CPU with the same 8-core layout and 18MB Oryon Flex Cache on the same 2nm process node and the same overall features, barring a couple of downgrades in AI, gaming and video capabilities.
Namely, its NPU doesn’t get the same 50% larger shared NPU memory footprint, while its Adreno GPU doesn’t get that 18MB of dedicated memory nor does it have the Adreno Matrix Cores for AI and Neural Fusion features like super resolution and frame generation. It also loses out on 8k60 and 4k240 video capture, and also doesn’t get the APV codec support; you do still get the 3D LUT support on the non-Extreme though.
Nevertheless, you’re still looking at a fairly impressive flagship mobile chipset, with the 8 Elite Gen 6 boasting 10% improved CPU performance, 35% improved GPU performance, 14% improved NPU performance, 37% better CPU power efficiency, 40% improved GPU efficiency and 20% better AI performance-per-watt comapred to the 8 Lite Gen 5.
Qualcomm says you can expect to see devices powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 very soon in flagships from their partner OEMs such as Honor, iQoo, Motorola, Nubia, OnePlus, Oppo, Redmi, Redmagic, Samsung, Vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.
Read more of our articles below!
