Lots of high-end chips incoming: 2nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro flagship phones most likely super expensive

Over the past few hours and days, leakers such as @Reptalicant on X and Digital Chat Station on Weibo have provided us with a lot of new information about Qualcomm’s high-end chips for late 2026. Unlike previous years, when there was typically only one new Snapdragon 8 chip to analyse, Qualcomm will likely treat us to at least four to five new mobile platforms for Android smartphones this year though only two of these will actually represent the new high-end tier, while two to three others are likely to be upgraded versions of the well-known Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 .

Two 2nm chips dominate the new high-end segment

Let’s start with what’s truly new this fall: For Mediatek (Dimensity 9600 generation), Apple (A20 generation) and Qualcomm, the transition to the smaller 2nm process node is imminent, after Samsung has already been touting 2nm for the Exynos 2600 since the start of the year. At Qualcomm, in addition to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, there will also be a Pro version for the first time. However, as fairly reliable leaks currently suggest, it will primarily stand out in two details.

According to these leaks, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro (SM8975) will support the LPDDR6 standard and feature an Adreno 850 GPU with higher clock speeds and 18 MB of graphics memory, compared to LPDDR5x and an Adreno 845 with 12 MB of graphics memory in the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 (SM8950). The SM8950 is likely to be the better choice for standard flagship smartphones for efficiency reasons as well—not to mention the even higher cost of LPDDR6 RAM amidst the current DRAM crisis—even though the SM8975 is also compatible with LPDDR5x.

Similarities and further differences

Both 2nm chip variants feature a 2+3+3 cluster with next-generation Oryon architecture, a shared 16 MB L2 cache and UFS 5.0 support, as @Reptalicant confirmed here based on leaked documents . The leaker also has additional details for us. For example, at least the SM8975 will feature the Qualcomm X105 modem unveiled this spring and will use new AI Frame Fusion technology to get the most out of the Adreno GPU. Both Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chips also support Wi-Fi 8 and Bluetooth 7, thanks to FastConnect 8800 support. The leaker also discovered another interesting detail regarding the the leaked Qualcomm documents: According to these, it appears that only the Pro model will decode Samsungs APV codec in hardware which was introduced with the Galaxy S26 Ultra (available here on Amazon US). That may potentially be a hint that the next “For Galaxy chip” in the Galaxy S27 Ultra will be based on the Snapdragon Pro version.