3 ways the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is actually worse than last year’s chip

Qualcomm is talking a big AI game with two flagship chipsets this year, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. But a closer look at the differences between these two chips reveals that the Extreme nomenclature is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting. Rather, it might be more realistic to call the regular version of the chip the 8 Elite Lite Gen 6.

While the two flagship processors share the same 5GHz peak clock speeds, new GPU architecture, and many of the same new AI features, the “regular” version of the Gen 6 misses out on a few of Qualcomm’s most impressive technologies. The list includes cutting-edge video codecs, Matrix cores for AI graphics, and 50% more local memory to support on-device AI models.