On September 22, Qualcomm unveiled two flagship mobile platforms – Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, designed for executing AI tasks directly on smartphones. Both are built on a 2nm process and include the Qualcomm Oryon processor, Adreno graphics, and Hexagon neural processor. The frequency of the two performance cores reaches 5 GHz.
A key update is the Qualcomm Sensing Hub with dual micro-NPUs and the Personal Scribe feature. It processes personal context with low power consumption: it works with models up to 200 million parameters, distinguishes speakers, forms local memory, and supports a voice agent directly on the device. The Hexagon has been enhanced with an Element Accelerator to speed up inference. The higher-end Extreme Gen 6 can locally run Mixture-of-Experts architecture models with 30 billion parameters, activating only a portion of them for specific tasks. In comparison, in June, Apple introduced the local AFM 3 Core Advanced with 20 billion parameters, activating between 1 and 4 billion.
Extreme Gen 6 supports 8K recording at 60 frames per second, 4K slow-motion at 240 fps, and the Advanced Professional Video codec. The Intelligent Pixel Control technology processes images at the pixel level, while Adreno matrix cores are used in Neural Fusion for AI scaling, frame generation, and neural reconstruction. The AI Voice Bubble feature separates voice from background noise during calls.
Devices on the new platforms will be released by HONOR, iQOO, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMI, RedMagic, vivo, and Xiaomi. Motorola has already announced the Signature 27 on Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Recall that in February 2024, Qualcomm introduced the AI Hub for running optimized AI models on user devices.
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