Qualcomm Unveils Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Chips With On-Device AI Push; Motorola First to Adopt

Qualcomm announced two flagship smartphone processors on Sept. 22, 2026, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, emphasizing on-device AI capabilities. At its annual Snapdragon Summit, the company said the chips feature new sensing hubs capable of running models up to 200 million parameters locally, enabling personal scribe functions, speaker differentiation and automated task suggestions. The Extreme version can run a 30-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model on-device, compared with Apple's 20-billion-parameter MoE model released in June. Both chips support AI-driven vocal enhancement and noise reduction, with the Extreme variant enabling 8K 60fps and 4K 240fps video recording and the Advanced Professional Video codec. Motorola announced its Signature 27 smartphone powered by the Extreme chip, with general availability expected in 2026.