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.
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