Qualcomm unveils two 2nm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chipsets at India Mobile Congress in Delhi

Qualcomm has introduced two new chipsets in India at the India Mobile Congress 2026 under way in Delhi. They are the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Some smartphone brands also showed glimpses of their upcoming devices running on the new chips at the event.

The chipsets were first unveiled at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in September. Both are built on a 2nm process and will use the company's custom Oryon CPU architecture. Qualcomm has highlighted improvements in on-device artificial intelligence (AI), gaming, camera processing and connectivity.

According to information provided by Qualcomm, the new platforms are designed to support more advanced AI experiences. These include agents that can understand a user's preferences and complete tasks with greater personalisation. The Extreme variant sits at the top of this category, while the standard Gen 6 aims to bring flagship-level features to several premium smartphones.

At the event in India, Motorola, iQOO and Xiaomi showed their upcoming smartphones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. iQOO displayed its upcoming flagship, the iQOO 16, which runs on the Extreme variant. The company has indicated that the smartphone will be launched in India soon.

During the presentation, Qualcomm said the main CPU cores of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 can reach a maximum frequency of 5GHz. The company has also claimed a 10 per cent improvement in the power efficiency of the overall system-on-chip (SoC).

Qualcomm says the chipsets deliver 40 per cent better GPU power efficiency and 37 per cent better CPU power efficiency. The company has also claimed a 144 per cent improvement in GPU performance. In addition, according to Qualcomm, the chipsets can run mixture-of-experts models with more than 30 billion parameters directly on the device with the help of their Hexagon element accelerator.