I Tested The Newest Snapdragon Chip, And Qualcomm Is Keeping Pace With The iPhone 18 Pro

Qualcomm has taken the wraps off of its latest and greatest processors — the chips that will power many of the flagship Android phones for the next year. The new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, and more interestingly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, look to be Qualcomm’s most significant updates in some time. Both are built on TSMC’s 2 nm process, which is a first for Snapdragon chips. 

Qualcomm brought me out to Hawaii for its annual Snapdragon Summit event so I could see for myself how the new chips perform. I got some time with a reference device running the Elite Extreme, and the early benchmark numbers are impressive. I was only able to test the top-binned Elite Extreme myself, not the standard Elite, so everything here reflects the higher-end chip. The base Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 should perform almost as well; however, it likely won’t quite reach the heights of the higher-end model.

Both Gen 6 chips use Qualcomm’s custom Oryon CPU architecture with a 2+6 core layout — two Prime cores clocked at up to 5.0 GHz and six Performance cores at up to 4.0 GHz. That 5 GHz figure makes it the first mobile CPU to crack that barrier, at least on paper. Qualcomm claims the Elite Extreme delivers 13% better CPU performance and 37% better CPU power efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. The Elite Extreme supports both LPDDR5X and LPDDR6 memory (up to LPDDR6-5300 and 24 GB) along with UFS 5.0 storage.

On the GPU side, the Elite Extreme variant packs what Qualcomm calls Adreno Neural Fusion — essentially AI-powered super-resolution and frame generation built into the GPU pipeline — plus hardware ray tracing with support for Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen global illumination, MegaLights, and Nanite. Qualcomm says the Extreme variant specifically delivers 44% better GPU performance and 40% improved GPU efficiency over Gen 5, thanks in part to 18 MB of dedicated Adreno High-Performance Memory and full Adreno Matrix Cores for GPU-side AI processing.

The neural processor has been overhauled, too. Qualcomm’s re-engineered Hexagon NPU features a new Element Accelerator and what the company says is 35% better NPU performance with 33% improved AI performance-per-watt on the Extreme. According to Qualcomm, the Elite Extreme can run 30-billion-plus parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) models on-device with up to 32K context.

At the event, we were able to put reference devices through benchmark tests — but not use them in day-to-day situations. Put simply, the new chips do perform better, though the tangible difference between a production-ready phone with a new chip and the best Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chips remains to be seen.

On Geekbench 6, the Elite Extreme scored an average of 4,287 in single-core and 12,791 in multi-core. For context, the RedMagic 11S Pro — the fastest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device I’ve tested — hit 3,815 single-core and 12,148 multi-core. That’s roughly a 12-13% single-core improvement and around a 5% multi-core gain. Against the broader Gen 5 field, the gap obviously widens further — the RedMagic device is tuned specifically for performance and has a literal fan on the back. The Galaxy S26 Ultra, for instance, managed 3,685 single and 11,198 multi — putting the Gen 6 roughly 16% ahead in single-core and 14% in multi.

The GPU results were more impressive than the CPU scores. In 3DMark Wild Life Extreme tests, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 posted scores between 9,830 and 9,984 on its best loops. The RedMagic 11S Pro topped the Gen 5 field at 8,116, so you’re looking at about a 21-23% uplift. Against the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s 7,802, that’s a 26-28% jump.

Compared to the iPhone 17 Pro’s A19 Pro chip (5,865 in the same test), the Gen 6 is in a completely different league on raw GPU throughput. Against the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro (3,918 single and 10,158 multi on Geekbench 6), the Gen 6 leads by about 9-10% in single-core and roughly 26% in multi-core. Against Apple’s freshly announced A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro — which early results peg at 4,735 single-core and 12,800 multi-core — the results flip on single-core. The Gen 6 trails the A20 Pro by about 9-10% there, but the two are essentially neck and neck in multi-core.

All of these numbers come with a big asterisk, though. I tested on a Qualcomm reference device — not a phone anyone will actually buy. Reference hardware is designed to let the chip stretch its legs, with thermals and power delivery tuned to showcase peak performance. What happens when Samsung, OnePlus, or Xiaomi put this silicon into a real phone with real thermal constraints is a different question entirely.

We’ve seen this play out clearly with Gen 5. Wild Life Extreme stability across Gen 5 devices ranged from 45.8% on the Galaxy S26 to 81.0% on the actively cooled RedMagic 11S Pro in my testing. Mainstream flagships without active cooling throttled much harder to stay within their thermal envelopes. The Gen 6’s higher peak numbers could easily compress under similar constraints.

There’s also the gap between the Elite Extreme and the standard Elite to consider. I didn’t get to test the standard variant, but Qualcomm says it lacks the Extreme’s 18 MB Adreno High-Performance Memory, full Adreno Matrix Cores, expanded NPU shared memory, and the top-tier video capabilities like 8K/60 capture and 4K/240 slow-motion. Both share the same 2 nm process, Oryon CPU architecture, and 5 GHz peak clock speed, so CPU performance should be in the same ballpark. But GPU and AI workloads could look quite different. Most flagship phones will probably ship with the standard Elite; expect the Extreme to show up in gaming-focused devices and ultra-high-end flagships willing to pay the silicon premium.