Igeekphone News, February 9th: The next-generation flagship platform of Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series, will break the norm and adopt a new strategy of releasing two chips simultaneously for the first time.
Among them, the more high-end Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 Pro not only exclusively supports the new generation of LPDDR6 memory, but also integrates the full-power GPU core and a larger capacity of cache, striving to achieve a leapfrog breakthrough in extreme performance.
The performance improvement comes at a high manufacturing cost. According to industry supply chain reports, the entire Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 series will be manufactured based on the most advanced N2P process technology of TSMC. As the manufacturing cost of 2nm wafers is expected to soar to $30,000, the purchase price of Qualcomm’s chips will also increase accordingly.
The cost of a single chip for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 Pro is very likely to exceed $300, which is almost equivalent to the price of a mid-range phone currently available on the market.
This unprecedented cost pressure, combined with the recent price hikes of storage chips and memory components, indicates that a price increase wave will hit the next generation of flagship mobile phones collectively. For mobile phone manufacturers, how to strike a balance between performance pursuit and terminal pricing will become the biggest challenge in 2026.
Due to the limitations of procurement costs, domestic mobile phone manufacturers will also become more cautious in choosing the configurations for their flagship models. In the future, domestic models may no longer come with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 Pro as a standard feature across the entire range. Instead, it will only be retained in top-end versions such as Pro or Ultra. As for standard models, they may be equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 standard version, and there is no doubt that they may even continue to use the mature platform from the previous generation.
In terms of release schedule, Xiaomi remains at the forefront of the industry. According to the current progress, the Xiaomi 18 series is currently in the deep research stage and has secured the global first release right for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen6 series. It is expected to make its official debut in September this year.