Qualcomm’s iPhone Killer Chip Is a Performance Monster Built for Supersized Phones

The back-and-forth between the iPhone and Android chips is becoming less of a cat fight and more of a bear pit full of starving ursines. We’ve seen how the iPhone 18 Pro’s A20 Pro chip has enabled a long-lasting and capable device. Now, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 , which will power the next generation of Android flagship phones, is representing the modern epitome of sustained performance gaming potential.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is powerful, yes, but it’s also made for people who think their phones need to be the biggest, most powerful slabs possible. And that means these devices are going to cost a ton of money, and they’re definitely not going to be the kind of small phones you can slip into a pair of skinny jeans.

Here’s the breakdown: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is the ultra-powered version of the base Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6. Sure, both eight-core chips are built on the more efficient 2nm process compared to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s 3nm. However, only the “Extreme” version attains a 5GHz peak clock speed for its fastest “Prime” cores. Otherwise, Qualcomm’s “Extreme” CPU is packing a whole lot of AI capabilities inside, plus extra additions to the GPU to enable enhanced AI upscaling—part of the new “Neural Fusion” capabilities that could help you game at a better frame rate for longer.

At this year’s Snapdragon Summit , Qualcomm let tech media run a few benchmarks on a jumble of Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 reference design units. (Full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip.) These phones aren’t anything you can buy. They are running on 24GB of RAM—twice as much as you get on a base Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra powered by last year’s flagship Snapdragon chip. They’re also running with a 4,400mAh battery, which is actually a smaller capacity than Samsung’s previous flagship.

So with all that in mind, Qualcomm’s blueprint phones hit an 8% uptick in multi-core capabilities in Geekbench 7. That test runs through the CPU’s general capabilities on a phone. However, Apple still has around a 10% benefit in single-core settings, which means Apple’s phone has the slightest edge for tasks like loading web pages.

That’s not a major difference. You’ll find more variance in how capable the A20 Pro or Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is for real-time graphics, like gaming. In 3DMark’s “Steel Nomad Light” tests, the Qualcomm reference phone made off with 20% better performance. It’s a similar story for the “Wild Life Extreme” test, with Qualcomm offering 22% better performance. For ray tracing, the simulated realistic lighting used in demanding games, 3DMark’s “Solar Bay” test on Qualcomm’s device did 17% better.

Here’s the problem: these phones ran hot. I couldn’t run multiple tests in a row without waiting for the device to cool down. After running the Antutu smartphone benchmark, the device was roasting and lost nearly 9% battery in just a few minutes.