Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6: Early rumours suggest Qualcomm is onto another performance and efficiency winner
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is only just a month old at this point and will not find its way into many new flagships until early next year, including Samsung's successor to the Galaxy S25 Ultra (curr. $949 on Amazon). Nonetheless, rumours about its successor have already emerged on Weibo. Incidentally, Qualcomm has not even got the cheaper Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 out the door yet, which is said to feature inside a future OnePlus smartphone backed by a circa 8,000 mAh battery.
According to Digital Chat Station, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 will mark Qualcomm's transition to 2 nm-class nodes. For context, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the second 3 nm chipset Qualcomm has offered to Android OEMs after using 4 nm nodes across its first-generation Snapdragon X line-up and many recent Snapdragon 8 series mobile chipsets. Specifically, Digital Chat Station reports that Qualcomm will use TSMC N2P nodes for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, which are due to enter mass production during the second half of 2026.
If that is the case, then it would see Qualcomm skipping TSMC's N2 node for its next Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. Based on TSMC's current estimates, its N2P nodes will deliver an 18% performance improvement over its N3E equivalents without increasing power consumption.
In fact, TSMC's N2P nodes could help reduce power consumption by circa 36% compared with the N3E node used in the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Moreover, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is said to combine N2P nodes with LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.0 flash storage. The notion that N2P nodes will not be ready until July calls into question whether the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 will be ready in time for a September 2026 official launch, though.
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