Another year, another Snapdragon chip, right? Well, we get two: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. And I just benchmarked the Extreme.
Let’s answer some key questions. First, how does it fare against the powerful A20 Pro in the Apple iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max? Second, are Qualcomm’s claims supported by testing? And third, how big of an upgrade over previous generations is it and who should think about buying it?
This is a reference design Qualcomm Reference Designs (QRDs) were used in this benchmarking session – not final hardware that the chipset sports. The model I tested packs 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, 1TB of storage, a 4,400 mAh battery and a 6.73-inch 1440×3200 pixel AMOLED screen. So you get something largely representative of what you’ll get in the future (perhaps with a bigger battery).
Geekbench battle – iPhone 18 Pro wins
The bragging point of the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is a 13% faster CPU speed than Gen 5, which, based on my own tests, is somewhat modest!
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chip (phone) | Geekbench 7 single-core | Geekbench 7 multi-core |
|---|---|---|
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (QRD) | 4161 | 12464 |
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra) | 3110 | 10578 |
A20 Pro (iPhone 18 Pro Max) | 4741 | 12789 |
A good part of it comes down to the two new prime cores that can run at 5GHz (a world record for smartphones), which you can feel with temperatures getting hot on the back of these reference designs.
That being said, in our own testing, Apple’s newly designed CPU remains in the single-core range, while the multicore results gap narrows a bit.
In use, quickly switching between apps and loading that RAM with different apps in the background, the snappiness of this was not affected.
In all honesty, you won’t really feel that difference in real-world use in that gap, but for the speed-and-feed nerds among you (welcome to the family), the Cupertino crew remains ahead.
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chip (phone) | AnTuTu performance score |
|---|---|
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (QRD) | 5,656,347 |
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra) | 3,463,142 |
Although we don’t specifically test for AnTuTu in our labs, it’s worth noting that I run this suite along with AI benchmarks (more on that later). So here are the results.
Gaming is a different story
Now on paper, if you were to take the 3DMark numbers you see here, you would see that the revised GPU with neural accelerator in the A20 Pro trades with the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
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chip (phone) | 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme | 3DMark Wildlife Extreme |
|---|---|---|
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (QRD) | 2262 | 9941 |
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra) | 1372 | 6632 |
A20 Pro (iPhone 18 Pro Max) | 2904 | 8344 |
So on a pure apples-to-apples (pun intended), the silicon level is pretty evenly matched. But the real win for Qualcomm comes in the form of Adreno Neural Fusion (ANF) – Snapdragon’s AI upscaling and frame generation tech.
iPhones have MetalFX, which is based on Spatial and Temporal Upscaling. Basically, this tracks motion, contrast and edges on a lower resolution image to paint in missing pixels. It does the job OK, but is a bit of an old fashioned way of going about it (and quite power intensive).
Meanwhile, ANF is AI-based (running in the display coprocessor), which uses these AI-specific matrix cores and high-performance memory to build frames based on shared knowledge, and can even use the same AI hardware to input generated frames to smooth frame rates.
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(Image credit: Future)
Does this work like DLSS? Yes, it seems like Qualcomm did a bit of homework on Nvidia. But the purpose is different – instead of expressing the highest FPS possible without thinking about battery consumption, ANF is designed to make things more efficient over long-term play.
And in the Traverse benchmarks built for this purpose, I saw a drastic reduction in the total wattage needed to run these demos, while also seeing better detail on faces and terrain.
Ready for agentic AI?
This seems to be the big difference between 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. With a 50% larger shared memory across the chip and support for a much greater mix of expert (MoE) AI models on device, this chip is better prepared for what Qualcomm calls the “agentic age” for smartphones.
Basically, the idea is that a phone can work for you instead of with you in some key tasks, and even across devices. It’s an ambitious goal that’s starting to come into view, but we’ll see how people feel about using this in practice. That being said, the AI benchmarks show a significant uplift over previous generations:
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chip (phone) | AnTuTu General AI | AnTuTu LLM AI |
|---|---|---|
Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (QRD) | 3,027,351 | 3,661,014 |
Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra & RedMagic 11 Pro) | 2,517,068 | 946,492 |
Yes, you read that right. That is a massive Increase in LLM performance, which shows that these AI-dedicated cores are doing their job well here.
What about heat and battery life?
Take this with the largest grain of salt available. A 4,400mAh battery cell will not be representative of what you will see in final models. In fact, chances are that this is an ultra flagship-level chip, you’ll see the Elite Extreme next to a massive silicon carbon battery to make it last longer.
That being said, the Antutu performance benchmarks show how much battery is consumed over that time, as well as the rise in temperatures during that time. The result, as you can see, shows just how hungry these prime cores can be when running at full power.
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Temperature rise during the test (Fahrenheit) | Battery drain during test |
59 degrees | 6% |
Of course, as I said, with larger cells, this percentage of the battery can be less pronounced, but getting to 5 GHz will take some brunt.
Another big takeaway for Apple, but should you upgrade?
So it goes without saying these days, the upgrades from previous generations are nice to see, but still very iterative if you’re on the upgrade train with a 1-2 year old phone.
If you have a phone from the last year or two, except you really care about agent AI or want to be ready when Adreno Neural Fusion comes to more games through Unity and Unreal Engine 5 support, it won’t be worth the upgrade.
But one thing is clear – this chip is Qualcomm’s biggest statement of intent about where they think the smartphone is going. It is no longer an app-based system; it is an agent, and everything is purpose-built around this.
I look forward to seeing what this chip can do in more phones, starting with Motorola later this year with the Signature 27.
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