I Tried The First Smartphones With The Most Powerful New Snapdragon Chip — Here’s What It Can Do

Qualcomm launched its two new flagship phone chips at Snapdragon Summit this week: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The company invited me to Summit to take a look, and I spent time with both new chips running in reference devices on site. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is the faster and more powerful of the pair, and it sits above the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 in Qualcomm’s lineup — which is something the manufacturer has never done before.

For those who are unfamiliar, a reference device is a test phone built by the chipmaker rather than a finished product — one of the phones had mounting screws and an exposed part of the motherboard; that’s how unpolished they are. The new reference phones I used to put the new chips through their paces had 24 GB of RAM, 1 TB of storage, a 6.73-inch AMOLED display, and a 4,400 mAh battery. Some of those specs are less powerful than the ones retail phones will offer with their bigger batteries, cooling systems, and software tuning, which will change how the chip behaves.

Switching between apps felt extremely responsive with plenty of things running in the background, and I couldn’t get the device to stutter or freeze while multitasking. Qualcomm claims a 13% CPU improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and two prime cores running at up to 5 GHz do a lot of that work.

But pushing those cores generates serious heat. The reference device got ridiculously hot during demanding tasks, to the point where it was uncomfortable to hold. Those 5 GHz cores are power-hungry when they run flat out, and a 4,400 mAh battery is on the small side for the kind of ultra-premium phones this chip will end up in.

Silicon-carbon batteries with greater capacity would help, and a dedicated cooling system will decide how long a phone can hold peak speed before it throttles back. Every dedicated gaming phone among the most powerful gaming phones you can buy right now leans on elaborate cooling for exactly that reason, and mainstream flagships have less room to work with.

I ran Geekbench 7 on both reference devices and compared them against the iPhone 18 Pro I reviewed. The 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 scored 4,155 single-core and 12,455 multi-core, while the standard 8 Elite Gen 6 managed 3,553 and 11,788. Apple’s A20 Pro came in at 4,735 and 12,545, so it has a clear single-core lead while the multi-core gap is almost nothing.

But benchmark results can only tell you so much. In everyday use, I doubt most people would notice any difference between the A20 Pro and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 in terms of performance. In my iPhone 18 Pro review, I said  “There isn’t a task I can throw at the iPhone 18 Pro that it would struggle with,” and I think the same will be true for phones with the new 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip.

The difference in performance I did notice was between Qualcomm’s new two chips, where the Extreme was noticeably quicker than the standard Gen 6 under heavy loads. Benchmarking tests took longer to run as well. The iPhone also ran substantially cooler than the reference device, though that comparison involves a finished phone with a redesigned cooling system and new vapor chamber against a test board in a plastic shell.

For many users, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6’s graphics performance will be more interesting than the CPU benchmarking numbers. Qualcomm’s Adreno Neural Fusion uses AI to upscale the graphics a game renders and actually generates extra frames between the ones in the game, so the graphics chip does less work for each frame you see. Nvidia’s DLSS on PCs uses the same idea, and Apple has its own version called MetalFX. Qualcomm’s version runs on dedicated AI hardware inside the graphics chip and uses shared memory to reconstruct and generate frames, and it leans on power savings more than raw frame rates.

In the on-device demos, environmental textures looked better, particularly details in the terrain. Lighting and shadows are another area where this chip performs exceedingly well, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing. The combination of a cleaner image and lower power draw is very compelling, since sustained gaming is where some Android phones tend to fall apart. Both Qualcomm and Apple are competitive on raw graphics performance, so this kind of AI rendering could end up being the thing that separates them.

Qualcomm spent a lot of Snapdragon Summit talking about agentic AI and the idea of your phone completing complicated tasks with multiple steps on its own. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 has 50% more shared memory across the chip and supports larger mixture-of-experts (MoE) models running on-device — these are AI models that split work across specialized sections instead of running the whole model at once.

But testing how well these chip improvements work proved difficult. I could only run AI benchmarks, which say very little about whether a phone will actually be useful, unlike CPU benchmarks. How well local AI works depends on the tasks you give it and the software each phone maker ships, since each offers a different suite of features. Since I was benchmarking on reference devices, unfortunately, none of that existed in any meaningful way I could try just yet. If this is something you care about, keep an eye out for reviews of the first smartphones with the new Snapdragon chips.

I also got a brief hands-on with the Motorola Signature 27, one of the first phones confirmed to use the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip. It’s one of the best-looking phones Motorola has made, with a ceramic and brushed aluminum camera housing and two Pantone finishes, one in a woven tactical look and one in a brushed textile.

Motorola says it uses a new ArcticMesh cooling system that combines diamond-infused thermal gel, liquid metal, copper mesh, and a 3D vapor chamber that’s 40% larger than the previous generation, which sounds like a direct answer to the heat I felt. It also has a 50 MP Sony LYTIA 910 main camera, a 200 MP periscope telephoto, built-in speakers tuned by Bang & Olufsen, and seven years of OS upgrades. Motorola says it’s coming to markets worldwide in 2026.

But it’s not quite the first smartphone announced to sport Snapdragon’s newest chip — Xiaomi got there first with its 18 Pro series. The Xiaomi 18 Pro packs the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, while the 18 Pro Max offers the Extreme version alongside an 8,500 mAh battery. Both launched in China on September 23, with a global release planned later this year. Honor is due to follow with the launch of the Magic 9 Pro Max on September 28.

I’d wait for reviews of these upcoming phones before drawing conclusions about gaming performance or battery life, and it’s worth paying attention to how they handle heat. It’s also worth keeping in mind that rising memory costs are already pushing up prices on phones and other gadgets, so the phones packing the Extreme will sit at the top of their makers’ ranges.