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

Qualcomm has introduced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 alongside a second flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Both are built on a 2nm process and are the company's first silicon at that scale. The two chips will reach phones from Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo, Honor, iQoo, Nubia, OnePlus, Redmi, Redmagic, and ZTE. Motorola is the first manufacturer to commit, confirming its newly announced Signature 27 flagship will use the Extreme version.

Qualcomm calls both chips flagships, and the two share most of their specifications. The modems, display specs, security features, GPS, and memory and storage support are identical. Qualcomm no longer publishes detailed breakdowns of the cores across its silicon, but the CPU details it did release match on both chips: two big cores at up to 5GHz and six performance cores at up to 4GHz.

Even so, Qualcomm describes the Extreme as delivering somewhat better CPU, GPU, and NPU performance. The clearer gaps appear in specific areas. The 8 Elite Extreme supports stronger video capture, including 8K at 60fps, 4K at 240fps, and the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec. It also carries a larger shared memory pool for the NPU, which Qualcomm says should produce faster and more efficient AI performance.

On the Extreme chip, AI-dedicated matrix cores in the GPU, combined with additional memory, are expected to slightly improve gaming performance when AI features are in use. Outside those areas, the differences between the two chips are limited, mostly covering AI processing, video capture, and gaming performance.

Because the performance gap appears small, the choice of which chip goes into which phone is an open question for manufacturers. The 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 are Qualcomm's first 2nm silicon. They join Apple's A20 Pro and MediaTek's Dimensity 9600 Pro in bringing the new silicon scale to smartphones.

The launch matters for the US market because Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips power many of the flagship Android phones sold by US carriers, and the phones named as adopters include brands with a significant US presence, such as Motorola, OnePlus, and Xiaomi. Which of the two chips ends up in US-bound models will determine what buyers actually get for their money.

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