- Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chipset family, built on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s 2-nanometer process, with a higher-end "Extreme" variant; the chips will ship in premium smartphones from Motorola, Xiaomi and ZTE.
- The overall smartphone market is expected to shrink 14% in units shipped in 2026 and another 1% in 2027 as skyrocketing memory costs raise finished-device prices, according to Counterpoint Research.
- Qualcomm positions phones running its high-end chips as an "AI hub" that processes models locally rather than in the cloud; the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 can run models with 30 billion parameters and includes security controls for background agents.
- The chipsets pair a CPU, GPU and NPU for AI workloads, and Google's Gemini will use the chip's processing power and sensors to understand user context, Qualcomm said at its livestreamed launch.
Quotes
“We're going into this transition from what is a very phone-centric model to now an agentic-centric model for new experiences”
“AI will now require the device to do much more than just execute commands, and it's going to be less about navigating apps, and and it's going to be about completing tasks for you”