When something is called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, it has to be faster than everything else that came before. A report claiming knowledge of Qualcomm’s upcoming chipset upgrade reckons it will be. Okay, it always was, but it might be considerably faster than the previous generation of mobile chips.
It’s got some distance to go before it’ll beat the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that is expected to power the likes of Samsung’s new Galaxy S26 phones. Those should feature a clock speed of 4.74GHz, a Samsung-specific upgrade on the stock hardware that will run at 4.61GHz.
Slaying the Snapdragon 8 Elite
Word out of China (via the country’s social media website Weibo) reckons that Qualcomm will blow past this year’s speeds with its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro. A minimum speed of 5GHz is planned, with speeds as quick as 5.5GHz likely. The first prize, and one the company will target heavily, is a 6GHz clock speed for the mobile chipset’s performance cores.
The real problem with nabbing speeds like this in a mobile ecosystem is thermal management, and it’s this that Qualcomm has apparently reworked to grab its claimed processor speeds. Incorporating Heat Path Block (HPB) tech, something created by Samsung for its high-end Exynos lineup, will apparently provide the thermal dissipation needed to push the company’s mobile hardware to these extremes. Since Samsung has been awfully chummy with the chip-maker lately, the tech crossover is believable.
The claimed speeds, though? Also believable, if harder to confirm at this point in the year. There are two versions of Qualcomm’s newest speedster planned, the stock 8 Elite Gen 6 and the Pro variant. If any hardware gets the speed upgrade, it’ll be the one with the ‘Pro’ in its name. We’ll likely have to wait until September this year (in the absense of any more leaks, verified or otherwise) to know for sure just how speedy 2027’s smartphones will be.
