I tested Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 — 16% faster CPU and huge AI-infused gaming upgrades, but Apple’s A20 Pro pulls ahead in some areas

Another year, another Snapdragon chip, right? Well, we’re getting two: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. And I’ve just benchmarked the Extreme.

Let’s answer some key questions. First, how does it fare against the mighty A20 Pro in Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max? Second, are Qualcomm’s claims backed up by testing? And third, how big of an upgrade over previous generations is it and who should be thinking about buying in?

This is a reference designQualcomm Reference Designs (QRDs) were used in this benchmarking session — not final hardware sporting the chipset. 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’re getting something largely representative of what you will get in the future (maybe with a bigger battery).

Geekbench battle — iPhone 18 Pro wins

The bragging point of 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is a 13% faster CPU speed than Gen 5, which, based on my own testing, they’re being a little modest!

A good chunk of this comes down to those two new Prime Cores that can run at 5GHz (a world’s first 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 re-engineered CPU continues to stay ahead in single-core, while the multicore results gap narrows a little bit.

In use, quick switching between apps and loading up that RAM with various 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 speeds-and-feeds nerds amongst you (welcome to the family), the Cupertino crew remains out front.

Also, while we don’t test specifically for AnTuTu in our labs, it’s worth noting I got to run this suite along with AI benchmarks (more on that later). So here are those results.

Gaming is a different story

Now on paper, if you were to take the 3DMark numbers you see here, you’d see that the overhauled GPU with neural accelerators in the A20 Pro trades blows with the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.

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 do 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 inside the display coprocessor), which uses those AI-specific Matrix Cores and high performance memory to upscale frames based on shared knowledge, and can even use that same AI hardware to insert generated frames to smooth frame rates.

Does this work like DLSS? Yes, it does seem like Qualcomm’s looked at Nvidia’s homework a little bit. But the purpose is different — rather than squeezing out the highest FPS possible without thinking about battery consumption, ANF is designed to make things more power efficient over long-term play.

And in the Traverse benchmarks purpose-built for this, I did see a drastic reduction in total wattage required to run these demos, while also seeing better detailing on faces and the terrain.

Ready for agentic AI?

This seems to be the big differentiator between 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. With a 50% larger shared memory across the chip and support for a vastly larger mix of expert (MoE) AI models on-device, this chip is better prepared for what Qualcomm is calling the “agentic age” for smartphones.

Basically, the idea that a phone can work for you rather than with you in some key tasks, and across devices too. 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 sizeable uplift over previous generations:

Yep, you read that right. That is a massiveincrease in LLM performance, which goes to show that those AI-dedicated cores are doing their job well here.

What about heat and battery life?

Take this with the biggest grain of salt available. A 4,400mAh battery cell is not going to be representative of what you may see in final models. In fact, chances are that with this being an ultra flagship-level chip, you’ll see the Elite Extreme pop up alongside a massive silicon carbon battery to keep it going for longer.

That being said, Antutu performance benchmarks show how much battery is consumed over that time, as well as the rising temperatures while doing so. The result, as you’ll see, shows just how hungry those Prime Cores can be when running at full power.

Of course, like I said, with bigger cells, this percent drop in battery may be less pronounced, but getting to 5 GHz will take some brunt.

Another big uplift to take on Apple, but should you upgrade?

So it goes without saying nowadays, the uplifts over previous generations are nice to see, but still very much iterative if you’re on the upgrade train with a 1-2-year-old phone.

If you have a phone from the past year or two, unless you reallycare about agentic AI or want to be ready for when Adreno Neural Fusion comes to more games through Unity and Unreal Engine 5 support, it’s not going to be worth the upgrade.

But one thing is clear — this chip is the biggest statement of intent from Qualcomm about where they think the smartphone is going. It’s no longer an app-based system; it’s an agentic one, and everything is being 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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• Motorola Signature 27 is the weirdest flagship I’ve seen in a long time — but it packs Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 and a 200MP telephoto