Qualcomm announces two Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips

You'd normally expect one flagship processor out of Qualcomm's annual Snapdragon Summit. This year, the company annnounced two: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and a faster Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

Both are the first-ever Qualcomm chips designed using the 2nm N2P technology by TSMC, thus putting them up against Apple's A20 Pro chip, MediaTek's Dimensity 9600 lineup, and Samsung's upcoming Exynos 2700.

Standard Gen 6 (SM8950) comes with two Prime cores at 5GHz each, six Performance cores at 4GHz, and 16MB Oryon FlexCache, resulting in a 10% CPU speed enhancement and 37% higher efficiency compared to the previous generation chip.

The chip's Adreno 845 GPU provides real-time hardware ray tracing, boasting a 35% increase in performance and a 40% gain in efficiency compared to the previous-generation GPU, along with features such as Lumen Global Illumination and Nanite Virtualised Geometry.

The chip can support up to QHD+ displays operating at 240 Hz, 4K+ displays operating at 120 Hz, or 8K displays operating at 30 Hz.

As for the camera capabilities, the new Spectra ISP supports sensors up to 320MP, can capture 108MP photos without any shutter lag, and can run three 64MP sensors at once with videos being recorded up to 8K30 and 4K120 in HDR.

The newly designed Hexagon NPU, featuring an upgraded Element Accelerator, boasts 14 per cent higher performance and 20 per cent increased performance per watt, with a context window of 32,000 tokens for agentic AI workloads. A

separate sensing hub with dual micro NPUs handles always-on audio and video intelligence independently of the main chip.

Rounding things out, the chip supports up to 24GB of LPDDR5x or LPDDR6 RAM, UFS 5.0 storage, Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth 6.0, and triple-frequency GNSS, putting it ahead of most current-generation competitors on paper.