Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 to power the next generation of Android smartphones.
The big change this year is how there are a pair of chips. Qualcomm considers both to be “flagship” offerings that give “OEMs greater choice.” The Elite Gen 6 is seen as the follow-up to last year’s Elite Gen 5, while the Elite Extreme Gen 6 comes in a level higher.
Both are built on a 2nm process with an Oryon CPU that has two 5GHz Prime Cores and six 4GHz Performance cores. The 8 Elite Gen 6 offers 10% improved CPU performance and a 37% gain in power efficiency compared to the Gen 5.
On the 8 Elite Extreme, CPU performance improves by 13% compared to last generation. A global VVC (H.266) codec on the Extreme allows for more power-efficient video.
A “rearchitected” Adreno GPU offers 35% improved GPU performance and 40% power efficiency improvement over the Gen 5.
On the Extreme, there are AI-dedicated Adreno matrix cores that allow for more advanced models to run. GPU performance improves 44% compared to last year. There’s also 18 MB of High Performance Memory that compared to last generation offers a 12% power improvement. For gaming, Adreno Neural Fusion uses the new GPU matrix cores for AI super-resolution and frame generation, which makes possible up to 40% power savings in supported games.
The Hexagon NPU features a new Element Accelerator for transformer workloads to benefit LLMs. There’s 14% improved NPU performance and 20% improved AI performance-per-watt with the 12 scalar + 8 vector + 1 tensor + 1 element configuration.
On the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, a 50% larger shared memory allows for 30B+ parameters Mixture of Experts (MoE) models. The aim is to reduce trips to external memory, with 35% improved NPU performance and 33% improved AI performance-per-watt.
The Spectra ISP features what Qualcomm calls Intelligent Pixel Control to understand scenes on a per-pixel level. On the Extreme, you have support for 8K60 video and 4K240 ultra HD slow-motion capture.
Both chips are paired with the Qualcomm X105 5G modem that is “newly architected” for greater downlink (10% increase) and uplink speeds. Specifically, six antennas can capture multiple data streams at once. This supports 3GPP Release 19 5G Advanced.
Motorola today announced the Signature 27 with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. More on that here.
Note: Qualcomm paid for travel and accommodations for this launch event, but had no input on editorial content.
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