It’s September, so of course Qualcomm is back with an even more powerful mobile phone chip. However, this time there are two: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6!
One thing is clear, the company is keen to tell you that these chips will “power the agentic AI age”, which is all fair and good (and a real advantage for this over the A20 Pro in the Apple iPhone 18 Pro). But there are a few other places where Snapdragon-armed phones get the edge.
Let me explain.
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Hourly speed of the charts
So it all starts with newly engineered Oryon CPU cores – the brains of the operation. And if you’re a speed and feed kind of person, the main thing to note here is that this is the world’s first 5GHz mobile CPU. The Prime Cores on 8 Elite Gen 6 are sure to tear through even the most intensive tasks.
Now of course this is before any real benchmarking has happened. Apple has always been up to some serious witchcraft and wizardry when it comes to this wicked single core speed. But this symphony of prime cores is sure to introduce some bonkers multicore speeds and give the Snapdragon the edge over the A20 Pro.
Bringing DLSS to smartphones
There is a 12% power improvement and new AI-dedicated GPU cores on board here. Beyond all your usual accelerated local AI numbers, one of the big things that comes with this is Adreno Neural Fusion – AI super resolution and frame generation for games.
Time will tell how many players will support this tech going forward. But with a 40% improvement in power and performance in key titles like Naraka Bladepoint and Honkai Starrail, as well as integration into game engines for future support, this could be significant in bringing more AAA titles.
My sensing hub tingles
Built on the chip is what Qualcomm calls the Sensing Hub. For local AI to be most effective, it needs an opportunity to be ready to listen at all times, to support models of appropriate size to understand all your personal context, and zippier speeds with greater efficiency.
This is the thing that connects the agentic AI loop through the CPU, GPU and NPU, because the ambient voice is captured, and with low latency the answers are received entirely on the device. A20 Pro is absolutely capable of this, but 8 Elite Gen 6 takes it a step further with a dedicated neural chip alongside the larger NPU.
Camera ceiling raised
And last but certainly not least, we come to the camera resolution. Each plate with an 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 inside has an advanced Spectra Image Signal Processing unit (ISP) capable of handling 8K 60 FPS video recording – or 4K 240 FPS slow motion.
Now, remember I said “resolution” and not “quality.” iPhones will always have a spectacular camera system, but if extra sharpness is important to your captures, 8 Elite Extreme phones will be able to.
The similarities
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. For every difference I can point to here, there are other ways in which these two SOCs are quite similar, such as AI accelerated GPU cores, a combo of performance and efficiency, and a secure enclave built directly on the chip.
There are some differences about these small dies with transistors thinner than the average human hair, but what they unlock seems to be similar enough: increase the NPU and memory throughput for a local AI future, turbocharge the GPU and further squeeze that power efficiency,
Look forward to testing from me soon!
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