Qualcomm to unveil Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 smartphone chips with AI focus

Qualcomm just pulled back the curtain on its next generation of flagship mobile silicon, and the headline number is a big one. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, set for a full unveiling at the Snapdragon Summit on September 22 in Maui, can run a 30 billion parameter mixture-of-experts AI model locally on a smartphone. What’s actually under the hood The 30 billion parameter figure comes with an important asterisk that makes the whole thing work. The chip uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, meaning the full model contains 30 billion parameters, but only about 3 billion are activated during any given inference step. The key enabler is Qualcomm’s revamped Hexagon NPU, which now includes a dedicated “Element Accelerator” built specifically for transformer workloads. The NPU also gets 50% more shared memory compared to the previous generation, which allows context windows up to 32K tokens. On the CPU side, the chip uses Qualcomm’s custom Oryon cores in a 2+3+3 configuration: two high-performance cores, three balanced cores, and three efficiency cores. The Adreno GPU gets an upgrade too, with new Matrix cores designed for AI-assisted graphics rendering. Both the standard and Pro var...