Qualcomm Launches Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 — First Chips With 8K60 Video

Qualcomm announced two new flagship chips at Snapdragon Summit 2026 in Maui, Hawaii: the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, both built on a 2nm process for the first time in the series. Both chips feature an Oryon CPU with two 5GHz prime cores and six 4GHz performance cores.

Most of the announcement's focus was on the Spectra image signal processor, which gains what Qualcomm calls Intelligent Pixel Control for per-pixel scene understanding, along with four times the video processing throughput of the previous generation. The ISP supports 64MP capture from three cameras simultaneously or 108MP from a single camera with zero shutter lag, and up to 320MP for still photos. The difference between the two chips shows up in video: the standard Gen 6 records 8K at 30fps, while the Extreme version reaches 8K at 60fps — a first for a smartphone chip — plus 4K slow motion at 240fps.

The first phones carrying the new chips are expected to be announced by Qualcomm's manufacturing partners in the coming weeks. For creators who rely on their phone as a secondary camera, the jump in image and video processing means the gap between a flagship phone and a dedicated small camera keeps narrowing in good lighting.