Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 for 30B-parameter AI

Qualcomm has announced two flagship mobile chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and a pricier Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both built on a 2nm process and positioned around what the company calls the “agentic AI” era. The Extreme model’s Hexagon NPU carries 50% more shared memory than the standard chip, which lets it run mixture-of-experts models, where only part of the model activates per token, with more than 30 billion parameters directly on a phone, according to Computerbase. Qualcomm calls the chips’ Oryon prime cores, which reach 5.0 GHz, the first smartphone CPU cores to cross that clock speed, according to Tech Advisor.

The fourth-generation Oryon CPU pairs two prime cores at 5.0 GHz with six performance cores at 4.0 GHz, sharing a single 16 MB cache pool that replaces the previous generation’s split 12+12 MB layout. Qualcomm claims 10% higher CPU performance on the Elite and 13% on the Extreme. The Adreno GPU clock rises to 1.45 GHz from 1.2 GHz, with reported gains of 35% and 44%, and the Extreme adds Matrix Cores for a feature called Adreno Neural Fusion, which handles AI-based upscaling and frame generation that the standard Elite lacks, according to Xenospectrum.

The Hexagon NPU keeps the same 12 scalar and 8 vector units as the previous generation but adds a new tensor unit and a redesigned Element Accelerator for element-wise tensor operations. Xenospectrum reports NPU performance gains of 35% on the Extreme and 14% on the standard Elite, with efficiency improvements of 33% and 20% respectively. Qualcomm frames the extra NPU memory and efficiency around “everyday agents” that respond faster, adapt to the user and learn throughout the day, with an enhanced Sensing Hub handling always-on, on-device voice processing.

Honor, Motorola, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi are confirmed adopters, while Samsung was notably absent from Qualcomm’s list. Tech Advisor names the Motorola Signature 27 as the first confirmed device. The chips also add support for LPDDR6-10600 memory alongside existing LPDDR5X-10600, and UFS 5.0 storage that doubles per-lane transfer rates to 46.4 Gbit/s, according to Computerbase.