While I have been here in Maui for two days already, today was day one of three for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit. Today’s focus was on the company’s broader agentic AI vision and how its smartphone business delivers it with a new dual-flagship approach. One of the greatest challenges that Qualcomm faces with its agentic smartphone approach is that much of the implementation and execution falls on the OEMs that use its chips. That means that Qualcomm can talk about agentic smartphones, but it has to lean on the OEMs to deliver and create meaningful experiences that move the industry forward.
The Power of Partnerships
Qualcomm’s CMO, Don McGuire, kicked off the day with a talk about community with Snapdragon insiders, as well as building an ecosystem of partners that help strengthen the Snapdragon brand. He was followed by CEO Cristiano Amon, who gave his view on the many aspects of agentic AI and how well-equipped Qualcomm is to deliver those experiences with all of the different CPU, GPU, NPU, and connectivity solutions it has. He also brought Google’s Rick Osterloh on stage to talk about its longstanding partnership and how the two companies are continuing to work together to enable this new agentic future. Amon also teased that the company’s HBC technology may find its way out of the datacenter into the edge around the Mobile World Congress timeframe early next year.
Trust Is Paramount for Agentic Commerce
Mastercard’s Raja Rajamannar also took the stage to discuss the unique experiences the agentic future can enable, but only with trust, using the right tools to enable safe and secure transactions. Amon also had long-time friend Sergio Buniac on stage, who is the company’s new EVP and group general manager for mobile, compute, and XR. Buniac brings unique practitioner experience to the role, having served as Motorola Mobility’s president and worked at that company for 30 years. He brings a unique perspective to the role, and I have worked with him in the past and know him to be a very shrewd, strategic operator. He also helped to bring Motorola back into relevance after a long time of being irrelevant.
The Chips Powering Agentic Phones
Qualcomm’s Chris Patrick, SVP and GM of the Mobile Handset division, came on stage to launch the company’s new dual-flagship strategy. These new 2nm chips, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, represent not only the company’s two-tier strategy but also the overall OEM approach to offering dual flagships. While there are subtle differences between the two chips, both feature the latest-generation Oryon CPU clocked at an industry-leading 5 GHz. With agentic AI and other workloads, the CPU has become more important than ever. Qualcomm claims that these chips can run 30B-parameter models locally while delivering strong gaming performance.
On the Elite Extreme, Qualcomm is introducing 8K60 and 4K240 video recording, as well as a new GPU with matrix cores to accelerate neural graphics rendering. Qualcomm is branding its neural rendering solution as Neural Fusion, which gets used differently depending on where the matrix multiplication cores exist (GPU or NPU). I have benchmarked the Elite Extreme chip and found it to be much faster than the last generation and quite competitive with Apple’s latest A20 Pro, although Apple still maintains the single-core Geekbench 7 CPU performance crown.
OEM partners include HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMI, RedMagic, Vivo, and Xiaomi. Qualcomm brought both Xiaomi and Motorola on stage to show off their new devices with Qualcomm’s chip, and Xiaomi got to claim that its new Xiaomi 18 series phones would be the first to launch with Qualcomm’s new mobile platforms.
Benchmarking the New Chip
I had the opportunity to benchmark the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (SD8EEG6) in my usual benchmark suite. In Geekbench 7, it beats the A19 Pro in single-core and multi-core performance but loses to the A20 Pro in single-core, while winning on multi-core. In 3Dmark Wildlife Extreme, the SD8EEG6 outperformed the S26 Ultra with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 by 24% and the iPhone 18 Pro with A20 Pro by 18%. This trend continues for GPU performance in 3DMark Solar Bay and Steel Nomad, with the Snapdragon winning over the A20 Pro. These numbers will need to be verified again on a commercial device, since these are Qualcomm’s reference devices rather than commercially available ones.
OEMs Are Still Responsible for Implementing Agentic AI
Qualcomm has wrapped a lot of innovation into its latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 mobile platforms and continues to push the envelope across all the different IPs that it has. Thanks to Xiaomi and others, we won’t have to wait long to see how some of Qualcomm’s latest features get implemented in OEM devices. OEMs can also use these innovations, paired with Qualcomm’s leading connectivity solutions, to compete with Apple’s latest iPhone 18 Pro and offer differentiated AI-enhanced experiences. We are also likely to see some challengers emerge from MediaTek’s 9600 Pro launch earlier this month, but few devices have been confirmed, aside from Oppo’s X10 Pro and Vivo’s X500 Pro.
