Qualcomm has split its flagship phone chip in two. At its Snapdragon Summit in Maui on Tuesday, it launched the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, both built on a 2nm process.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. makes the chips, CNBC’s Kif Leswing reported. Gizmodo’s Kyle Barr ran benchmarks on Qualcomm’s reference phones at the event.
“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,” said Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s general manager of mobile handsets.
What separates the two chips
Both chips use Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU, with two prime cores at up to 5GHz and six performance cores at up to 4GHz. Qualcomm calls it the world’s first mobile CPU to reach 5GHz.
The gap is in graphics, AI and video. Against last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm’s figures give the Extreme chip a 13% faster CPU, a 44% faster GPU and a 35% faster NPU. The standard chip gets 10%, 35% and 14%.
The Extreme records 8K video at 60 frames a second and 4K slow motion at 240. The standard chip tops out at 8K30 and 4K120, according to Qualcomm’s product briefs. Only the Extreme gets Adreno Neural Fusion, which uses AI to upscale game graphics and create extra frames.
Built for agents
Qualcomm pitched both chips at AI agents that run on the phone. The NPU handles context windows of up to 32,000 tokens and can run mixture-of-experts models with more than 30 billion parameters, it said on the third day of the summit.
A new Sensing Hub with two small NPUs runs Personal Scribe. It learns from messages, emails and conversations to build a private knowledge graph on the device, Qualcomm said.
Start-ups showed what that could look like. memories.ai demonstrated a visual memory that indexes a user’s day locally. AGI Inc. showed an agent that reads the screen and acts across apps. Liquid AI, which makes small on-device models, also appeared.
For cameras, the Spectra image processor moves to a 20-bit design. Qualcomm says it is the first mobile platform to support three 64MP cameras.
The phones
HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMI, RedMagic, vivo and Xiaomi will ship phones with the chips. Motorola showed its Signature 27 on stage.
In Qualcomm’s partner quote sheet, vivo named the iQOO 16 and iQOO Pad Ultra among the first Extreme devices. RedMagic named its 12Pro+. Motorola said it is using the Extreme chip in its flagships for the first time.
Xiaomi said it will use both chips in its upcoming premium phones. HONOR said the Extreme chip helped it bring ARRI, the cinema camera maker, to smartphones for the first time.
“This milestone enables us to deliver new levels of on-device AI, performance, and premium user experiences to consumers around the world,” said Nicole Hagen, Motorola’s head of global product marketing.
How it compares with Apple
In Gizmodo’s tests, the reference phones beat Apple’s A20 Pro by 8% on multi-core Geekbench scores and by about 20% in 3DMark graphics tests. Apple kept a lead of about 10% on single-core scores. The test phones also ran hot, Barr wrote.
The launch comes as memory shortages push up phone prices. Counterpoint Research expects smartphone shipments to fall 14% in 2026.
The chips were one of several launches at the summit, which also covered PCs, glasses and earbuds. Our summit roundup has the rest.