Qualcomm Reveals Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Chip Lineup

Qualcomm just revealed at its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaï the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, its latest flagship mobile chips that will power new premium smartphones to be released in the coming months. The two new mobile SoCs use a 2nm manufacturing process, just like Apple’s new A20 Pro chip, and they feature a reengineered Hexagon NPU optimized for agentic AI.

“As the agentic AI age evolves, our multi-flagship strategy allows us to push the boundaries of what’s possible for mobile while bringing our latest AI innovations to a broader range of premium devices,” said Chris Patrick, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Handsets, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “By designing two innovative platforms, we’re giving OEMs greater choice as we collectively shape the capabilities of the next generation of intelligent, personalized, mobile experiences.”

The base Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chip features a custom-built Qualcomm Oryon CPU with up to 5.0GHz peak speeds, a next-gen Adreno GPU with “intelligent graphics enhancements,” and an advanced Hexagon NPU for AI workloads. The Extreme version of the chip comes with AI-dedicated Adreno matrix cores on the GPU for running advanced AI models locally, and it also enables 8K 60 FPS and 4K 240 FPS slow-motion video capture, as well as “cinema-grade video” with support for the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec, Samsung’s alternative to Apple’s ProRes technology.

You can probably expect to find Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 6 chips in Samsung’s Galaxy S27 series, which should be released in early 2027. The company also said that Honor, iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Redmi, RedMagic, vivo, and Xiaomi will also use its latest chips in their upcoming flagship smartphones.