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Technology

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Extreme Gen 6, its first 2nm phone chips

Qualcomm has announced two new flagship smartphone chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Extreme Gen 6, built on a 2nm process and built for on-device AI — the first phones will arrive later this year.

By James Calloway · · Updated · 1 min read

Photo: Qualcomm, via ADSLZone

Qualcomm has unveiled two new flagship smartphone chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the higher-tier Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Maui on Tuesday, pitching both as built for the age of on-device AI agents.

Both chips are built on a 2nm process with a custom Oryon CPU — two Prime cores reaching up to 5GHz alongside six Performance cores — matching Apple on process for the first time. Qualcomm claims the Gen 6 delivers 10% better CPU performance and 37% better power efficiency than last year’s Gen 5, with the Extreme stretching the CPU gain to 13% and adding a 35% faster rearchitected Adreno GPU.

AI is the headline. A reengineered Hexagon NPU and an upgraded always-on sensing hub can run models of up to 200 million parameters, enabling a personal scribe that runs locally, distinguishes between speakers, and builds memory from usage. The Extreme variant can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model entirely on the device, Qualcomm says.

Camera hardware gets a pro push on the Extreme: 8K video at 60fps, 4K at 240fps for slow motion, and support for the new Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec. Motorola announced the Motorola Signature 27 as the first phone using the Extreme chip, with availability this year; Qualcomm says Honor, OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, vivo, iQOO, Redmi and RedMagic will also ship devices.

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