Qualcomm launches its first 2nm mobile chips: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6

At Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm introduced two flagship mobile chips — the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Both platforms are the company's first chips built on TSMC's 2nm process; Qualcomm no longer uses the "Pro" suffix in the names.

The heart of both platforms is the custom Oryon CPU: two Prime cores clocked at 5.00 GHz and six performance cores up to 4.00 GHz, plus 16 MB of Oryon Flex Cache. According to Qualcomm, the Extreme delivers +13% CPU performance and +37% power efficiency compared with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, while graphics gain 44% with a 40% reduction in power consumption. The regular Gen 6 is more modest: +10% CPU and +35% GPU.

The Hexagon neural unit has been reworked: a new Element Accelerator has been added, with a configuration of 12 scalar, 8 vector, 1 tensor and 1 element. On the Extreme version the NPU is 35% faster and the total memory pool is 50% larger, with claimed support for on-device MoE models of more than 30 billion parameters. Precisions range from INT2 to INT16, plus FP8 and FP16.

Graphics are handled by the Adreno 850 with Adreno Neural Fusion AI matrix cores, which take over part of the AI workload to raise frame rates. The Extreme gets a dedicated 18 MB of fast Adreno HPM memory — roughly 12% in energy savings. Hardware ray tracing and support for Unreal Engine 5 technologies are promised.

Cameras and video are handled by the Spectra ISP and three 20-bit AI ISPs: up to 320 MP for photos, and on the Extreme — 8K video at 60 fps and 4K slow motion at 240 fps, plus the industry's first hardware VVC (H.266) decoder and the APV codec.

Connectivity is provided by the Snapdragon X105 5G modem — the first ready for 3GPP Release 19 — and the FastConnect 8800 system with readiness for Wi-Fi 8, Bluetooth 6.0, UWB and Thread, plus NR-NTN and NB-NTN satellite connectivity. On memory: the regular Gen 6 works with LPDDR5X, the Extreme with LPDDR6, and both have UFS 5.0 storage.

Image: Coolcaesar at en.wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 · License

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.