The upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, Qualcomm’s next flagship mobile processor, delivers only a slight performance improvement in early benchmarks, signalling a cautious step forward amid ongoing development and hardware uncertainty.
Qualcomm’s next flagship mobile chip has surfaced in an early benchmark, but the result suggests only a modest step forward at this stage of development. A report from HTCMania says the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, identified internally as SM8975, has appeared in AnTuTu 11 with roughly 4.83 million points. On that basis, the gain over the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 would be limited to around 5% at the top end of the current range, although the result is likely to reflect unfinished silicon rather than final shipping hardware.
That caution is important. Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 8 Elite, announced in October 2024, introduced the company’s latest Oryon CPU, Adreno graphics and an upgraded Hexagon NPU, with major brands including Xiaomi, Samsung, OnePlus and others lining up devices around it. Qualcomm then followed with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in September 2025, describing it as its fastest mobile system-on-chip and again centring the platform on a third-generation Oryon CPU and on-device AI processing.
Leaks reported by Gizmochina in July suggest the Gen 6 family is being prepared as a broader split between a standard model and a Pro model. Both are said to use a 2+3+3 Oryon core layout and a 2nm manufacturing process, while the Pro version would carry a larger Adreno 850 GPU with 18MB of graphics memory. Notebookcheck has also reported that the Pro variant may be the only one to support LPDDR6 memory, with the less ambitious chip aimed at cheaper or smaller premium phones.
If those reports prove accurate, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro will be positioned as Qualcomm’s top-end part for the next wave of ultra-premium Android devices, with the annual Snapdragon Summit expected to provide the formal unveiling. Early speculation points to the Xiaomi 18 Pro range among the first handsets to use it, although the latest benchmark result is a reminder that pre-release numbers often move before commercial devices arrive.
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