Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 comes in an Extreme version too

There are two flagship Snapdragon chips this year, but good luck spotting the difference.

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, this year joined by the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 too. The company describes both new phone chips as flagships, and the spec differences are relatively minor, mostly limited to improved AI processing, video capture, and gaming performance on the Extreme model.

Both Gen 6 chips are built on a 2nm process, and share much in common, including their modems, display specs, security features, GPS, and memory and storage support. Qualcomm no longer publishes detailed breakdowns of the cores across its silicon, but the CPU details given are identical, with two big cores at up to 5GHz and six performance cores running at up to 4GHz. Despite that, the Extreme is described as having slightly superior performance across its CPU, GPU, and NPU.

Some differences are more clear-cut. The 8 Elite Extreme is capable of driving superior video capture, including 8K at 60fps, 4K at 240fps, and support for the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec. A larger shared memory pool for the NPU should drive faster and more efficient AI performance on the Extreme chip too, while AI-dedicated matrix cores in the GPU (plus more memory) should boost gaming performance slightly when using AI features.

With core performance seemingly similar, the jump up to the Extreme chip is relatively minor, so it will be interesting to see which chips manufacturers use for which phones. Motorola is the first to jump on board, confirming that its newly announced Signature 27 flagship will use the Extreme chip. Qualcomm has announced that the two chips will also be adopted by Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor, iQoo, Nubia, OnePlus, Redmi, Redmagic, and ZTE.

The two 8 Elite Gen 6 chips are Qualcomm’s first 2nm silicon, joining Apple’s A20 Pro and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9600 Pro in bringing the new silicon scale to smartphones.