Qualcomm Launches Two New Smartphone Chips With Emphasis on AI
Qualcomm split its flagship in two at the Snapdragon Summit on 22 September 2026. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 share TSMC 2-nanometre process and an Oryon CPU clocking 5GHz, and diverge on everything that touches AI. The Extreme runs a mixture-of-experts model of more than 30 billion parameters locally, against a 200-million-parameter sensing hub both chips share. This article covers the tier split, the generation-on-generation gains, why efficiency improved more than performance in every block, and why a second flagship tier arrives as the smartphone market contracts 14 per cent.
