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Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is a 2nm phone chip for which Qualcomm claims 13% more CPU and 44% more GPU speed. Notebookcheck's OnePlus 16 test finds it relatively cool and steadier under load than most Gen 5 phones, but below some of them at peak.
Hardware & Analysis DeskEdited by Ege Erten
5 min readAI-assisted
Qualcomm's official key visual for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 mobile platforms; it shows the product family badges, not the OnePlus 16 phone.
Image: Qualcomm
Source · Press image from the Qualcomm newsroom, used for news reporting.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, a 2nm phone chip with two CPU cores rated up to 5.0 GHz, got what Notebookcheck calls its first look at a retail phone with the chip on Nov. 9, when it published results from the OnePlus 16. Voltgrid found no earlier lab review of a retail phone as of Nov. 10; earlier benchmarks ran on Qualcomm reference hardware.
The chip is the higher-tier of Qualcomm's two Gen 6 phone chips, announced on Sept. 22 at its Snapdragon Summit, and Qualcomm names OnePlus, iQOO, Xiaomi, RedMagic and others as phone makers for its Gen 6 chips. The test that counts is whether the promised jump shows up in a phone people can buy. On the first retail unit, it does not show up at peak, but the phone holds its speed better than most rivals under sustained load. Only one lab has measured it so far, so every measured number below comes from Notebookcheck, on one phone, in its default mode unless stated.
Qualcomm's product brief lists an eight-core Oryon CPU with 2 Prime cores up to 5.0 GHz and 6 Performance cores up to 4.0 GHz, with a 16 MB Oryon Flex Cache (Qualcomm does not say which cores share it), built on a 2nm process. Qualcomm does not name the foundry. The OnePlus 16 splits those six cores into 3 at 4.0 GHz and 3 at 3.7 GHz, according to Notebookcheck's spec sheet. The Adreno GPU, which Notebookcheck lists as the Adreno 850, gains matrix cores for AI work and keeps 18 MB of on-chip graphics memory. The Hexagon NPU runs formats from INT2 to FP16, and Qualcomm publishes no TOPS figure. The chip supports LPDDR5X or LPDDR6 at up to 5300 MHz and up to 24 GB, plus an X105 modem rated at up to 14.8 Gbps down and 4.2 Gbps up.
The idea that matters is the clock. The predecessor's Prime cores ran up to 4.6 GHz on a 3nm process, per Qualcomm. A faster clock lifts single-thread speed, but it also raises power and heat, and a phone has no fan to carry that heat away. That makes the phone maker's tuning, not the silicon alone, decide what a buyer gets. Qualcomm says as much on its brief: results vary by OEM implementation.
Against the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, Qualcomm claims 13% more CPU performance, 44% more GPU performance and 35% more NPU performance, with 37% better CPU efficiency, 40% better GPU efficiency and 33% better AI performance per watt. These are vendor claims, and Voltgrid found no independent test on a retail phone that reproduces them as of Nov. 10; tests on reference devices exist and are mixed. Voltgrid News also covered Samsung's Exynos phone chip, which one report puts ahead of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme.
Notebookcheck's tables put the OnePlus 16 against three Gen 5 phones (Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, Vivo X300 Ultra, Sony Xperia 1 VIII) and Apple's iPhone 17 Pro Max with the A19 Pro. Apple's newer A20 Pro, in the iPhone 18 Pro, does not appear in these tables; Voltgrid did not find A20 Pro results in them.
In Geekbench 7.0 single-core, the OnePlus 16 scored 2,888 points against 3,142 for the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Notebookcheck's average for the chip across three devices is 3,285, with a range of 2,888 to 3,610, so the OnePlus sits at the bottom of its own chip's spread. In 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited it scored 23,859, below the S26 Ultra's 30,624 and the iPhone 17 Pro Max's 26,375. Against Apple it did better in CPU throughput: 11,324 points in Geekbench 6.7 multi-core, against 10,017 for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra scored 11,337, level with the OnePlus 16.
The picture turns under sustained load. In 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme stress test, the OnePlus 16 kept 65.2% of its best loop, against 54% for the S26 Ultra and 60.4% for the Vivo X300 Ultra; the iPhone 17 Pro Max kept 71.8%. The surface peaked at 39 C at a 20 C room temperature. Notebookcheck says OnePlus seems to have throttled performance slightly for consistency, and that a High performance mode lifts scores a little but still trails the fastest Gen 5 phones.
A stress test runs the same graphics workload in repeated loops and reports the slowest loop as a share of the fastest, so a lower share means the phone slowed down more as heat built up. A phone has no fan, so heat sets how long a peak score lasts, and the maker's power limit decides the balance between the two.
The load-test wattage above is whole-phone power, not chip power.
Two results complicate the efficiency story. Under Notebookcheck's load test the whole phone drew 14.91 W on average, against 8.6 W for the S26 Ultra and 6.82 W for the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and its 9,000 mAh battery lasted 3.7 hours under load. In light Wi-Fi browsing it ran 29 h 14 min, against 17.9 h for the S26 Ultra and 28.6 h for the iPhone; those batteries are far smaller, so this is a phone result, not proof of the chip's efficiency claim. In Geekbench AI 1.7's NPU tests it scored 1,348 quantized, 551 single precision and 547 half precision, below the three Gen 5 phones in all three (1,530 to 1,622, 704 to 715 and 679 to 709). These are synthetic tests on one phone, and Voltgrid found no on-device language-model test on a retail phone as of Nov. 10.
The OnePlus 16 is sold outside China only as an import. Notebookcheck's loan provider, TradingShenzhen, lists it from US$877, and Notebookcheck's spec sheet gives a price of 1,100 euros. Notebookcheck says imported units lose eSIM support and miss some 4G bands. The phone ships with 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of UFS 4.1 storage and Android with ColorOS. On the graphics side Qualcomm lists Vulkan 1.4, OpenGL ES 3.2 and OpenCL 3.0.
The first test leaves three questions open. A second independent lab on a different retail phone would show how much of the OnePlus result is tuning. A measured GPU perf-per-watt figure would test Qualcomm's 40% efficiency claim. An on-device model benchmark would test the 35% NPU claim. Qualcomm's partner list names the upcoming RedMagic 12 Pro+ among the first Extreme Gen 6 devices. If a lab tests a phone tuned differently from the OnePlus 16, it would show whether the chip reaches the top of Notebookcheck's 2,888 to 3,610 single-core range in a shipping product.
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