Qualcomm has officially announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Elite Extreme Gen 6, the first smartphone processors to surpass the 5 GHz threshold on the main cores. A milestone that arrives alongside a significant update on artificial intelligence and camera, and that aims to become the heart of the next Android flagship devices.
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6: CPU, manufacturing process and performance of Qualcomm’s new SoC
Both chips are built on a 2-nanometer process and feature Qualcomm’s proprietary Oryon CPU, configured with 2 Prime cores and 6 Performance cores. The Prime cores reach 5.0 GHz, while the Performance cores cap at 4.0 GHz: it’s the first time a smartphone CPU has surpassed the 5 GHz threshold, but the news doesn’t end there and it’s not limited to brute force.
Hexagon NPU More Powerful, Extreme Model Doubles Shared Memory
The Hexagon NPU has been updated with a new Element Accelerator, capable of handling context windows up to 32K and AI models with up to 200 million parameters.
The Extreme variant adds two Micro NPU dedicated inside a new Sensing Hub, which according to Qualcomm offer up to 85% more performance and an additional 20% efficiency in contextual understanding of messages and emails. Also on the Extreme variant, the FlexCache shared memory increases by 50% compared to the standard Gen 6 model.
Camera and gaming: differences between Gen 6 and the Extreme variant
On the photography front, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 supports video recording up to 8K at 60 fps and 4K at 240 fps, compared with 8K at 30 fps and 4K at 120 fps of the standard Gen 6 variant, thanks to a more powerful Spectra ISP capable of handling a much larger amount of data than the previous generation.
For gaming, both chips integrate the new Adreno GPU and Neural Fusion technology, which leverages artificial intelligence for frame generation and image quality enhancement, with performance gains up to 44% on the Extreme variant; the latter adds dedicated Matrix Cores and high-performance graphics memory for additional headroom in the most demanding games.
Connectivity, memory and other novelties
Among other novelties there is a next-generation 5G modem with theoretical download speeds of up to 14.8 Gbps, support for the latest Wi‑Fi standard with throughput up to 11.6 Gbps and already geared toward the Wi‑Fi 8 standard, in addition to Bluetooth 6.0.
RAM support goes up to 24 GB, paired with UFS 5.0 storage. Debuts also Personal Scribe, a feature designed to manage on-device the user’s personal data such as voice, text and usage habits, locally on the device, without needing to send them to the cloud.
Which smartphones will power the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 lineup
The first devices in the world to mount Qualcomm’s new SoCs will be Xiaomi 18 Pro and Pro Max, coming to China in a few hours. Other anticipated flagships are Motorola Signature 27, OnePlus 16 and iQOO 16, but we know there will be many more.
For all the news on Snapdragon chipsets, you can find our most recent articles in the Qualcomm section on GizChina.it.
