Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is here — 4 ways the first 5GHz phone chip could crush Apple’s A20 Pro

It's September, so of course Qualcomm is back with an even more powerful mobile phone chip. However, this time, there’s two: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6!One thing is clear, the company are keen to tell you these chips will “power the agentic AI age,” which is all fair and good (and a real advantage for this over the A20 Pro in Apple’s iPhone 18 Pro). But there are a few other places where Snapdragon-armed phones will get the advantage.Let me explain.Clock speeds off the charts (Image credit: Qualcomm)So it all starts with re-engineered Oryon CPU cores — the brains of the operation. And if you’re a speeds and feeds kind of person, the main thing to note here is this is the world’s first 5GHz mobile CPU. Those Prime Cores on 8 Elite Gen 6 are sure to tear through even the most intensive of tasks.Now, this is of course before any real benchmarking has happened. Apple has always been up to some serious witchcraft and wizardry when it comes to this wicked single core speeds. But that symphony of Prime Cores will surely introduce some bonkers multicore speeds and give Snapdragon the edge over A20 Pro.Bringing DLSS to smartphones (Image credit: Tom's Guide)There’s a 12% power improvement and new AI-dedicated GPU cores on-board here. Beyond all your usual accelerated local AI numbers, one of the big things that comes with this is Adreno Neural Fusion — AI super resolution and frame generation for games.Time will tell on how many games will support this tech looking ahead. But with a 40% improvement in power and performance in key titles like Naraka Bladepoint and Honkai Starrail, as well as integration into game engines for future ease of support, this could be significant for bringing more AAA titles.Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips.My Sensing Hub is tingling (Image credit: Qualcomm)Built onto the chip is what Qualcomm’s calling the Sensing Hub. For local AI to be at its most effective, it needs a chance to be ready to listen at all times, support suitably sized models to understand all your personal context, and zippier speeds with greater efficiency.This is the thing that ties that agentic AI loop through the CPU, GPU and NPU, as ambient voice is captured, and with low latency, responses are received entirely on-device. A20 Pro is absolutely capable of this, but 8 Elite Gen 6 is taking it a step further with a dedicated neural chip alongside the bigger NPU.Camera ceiling lifted (Image credit: Sanuj Bhatia / Tom's Guide)And last but certainly no means least, we get into the camera resolution. Any slab with an 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 inside it has an advanced Spectra Image Signal Processing unit (ISP) that is capable of handling 8K 60 FPS video recording — or 4K 240 FPS slow motion.Now, bear in mind that I said “resolution” and not “quality.” The iPhones will always have a spectacular camera system, but if extra sharpness matters to your captures, 8 Elite Extreme phones will be capable of it.The similarities (Image credit: Tom's Guide)But the more things change, the more they stay the same. For every difference I can point to here, there are other ways these two SOCs are pretty similar, such as AI accelerated GPU cores, a combo of performance and efficiency, and a secure enclave built directly onto the chip.There are some differences across these tiny dies with transistors thinner than the average human hair, but what they unlock seem to be similar enough: boosting NPU and memory throughput for a local AI future, turbocharging the GPU and further squeezing that power efficiency,Look forward to tests from me soon enough! Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. More from Tom's GuideiPhone 18 Pro teardown reveals the ins and outs of the latest iPhone models — including one annoying repair issueI spent 30 minutes with the iPhone Duo — 3 things you just don’t get from the picturesSnap’s CEO told me he hates getting AI-drafted texts from his wife — so what’s the plan to fight brain fry with Specs?