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I benchmarked the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6: staggering performance gains over Gen 5

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is not a direct Elite Gen 5 successor – it's an even higher-end chipset.

By Rad Slavov

Updated: Sep 23, 2026, 2:46 PM

Processors Qualcomm

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A reference device running Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6

The reference device running Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme shows staggering performance. | Image by PhoneArena

Qualcomm flew me out to Maui to attend Snapdragon Summit 2026, and I got the chance to play around with a reference device powered by the new cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset. The focus of this session was to run the reference device through a number of benchmark applications. While the results that we get out of this device are not to be taken as the definitive performance of the new chip, they do give us a good understanding of what we can expect out of the Snapdragon Elite Extreme Gen 6.

In the table below you see the results from some of the most popular benchmark apps out there, such as Geekbench 6, Geekbench 7, various 3DMark tests for GPU, as well as the overall system benchmark AnTuTu. If we take all of these benchmarks and compare them against last year's 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset results (which are based on its implementation in the OnePlus 15), we can make a very rough estimation: the new chipset from Qualcomm is bringing over 37% total performance improvement.

	Elite Extreme Gen 6	Elite Gen 5	Performance improvement
Geekbench 6 single-core	4300	3500	22.8%
Geekbench 6 multi-core	13000	10700	21.5%
Geekbench 7 single-core	3600	2370	51.9%
Geekbench 7 multi-core	12350	9330	32.3%
3DMark Wildlife Unlimited	30000	28000	7.1%
3DMark Wildlife Extreme Unlimited	9900	7000	41.4%
3DMark Steel Nomad Unlimited	4350	2760	57.6%
3DMark Solar Bay Extreme	2230	1370	62.7%
AnTuTu	5.6M	4M	40%
Average CPU improvement			32%
Average GPU improvement			42%
Average overall improvement			37%

If we break the test down by CPU and GPU, we find that we can expect a roughly 32% improvement for the CPU and 42% improvement for the GPU. Again, these are extremely rough estimations, and they're based on a reference device that's powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. The thing about these performance scores is they will vary considerably based on how each manufacturer designs each specific phone or tablet, what type of cooling they'll use, etc.

For what these scores are worth, it really looks like the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 brings a major, major improvement for CPU and GPU performance.

Keep in mind that Qualcomm says the direct successor of the 8 Elite Gen 5 is the 8 Elite Gen 6, and the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 slots in right above the 8 Elite Gen 6. What we have here is a new type of mobile chipset, which is even higher-end than what we've been calling high-end so far.

At this point, I don't have 8 Elite Gen 6 numbers, but from what I'm hearing from Qualcomm, it sounds to me that its performance would be slightly lower than that of the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 – I believe to the tune of around 10-15%, which is still a major improvement over the Gen 5.

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Rad Slavov is the Editor-in-Chief at PhoneArena. He joined the media in 2008, right on the cusp of the modern smartphone revolution. Through time and perseverance, he amassed a great deal of knowledge and industry know-how, allowing him to guide and organize the company's growing line-up of talented content creators and ever-expanding content portfolio.

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