Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro Price Leaks Reveal Costly TSMC 2nm Fabrication And Future Flagship Device Inflation
New smartphone chipsets expected to carry a significantly higher price tag. New leaks that emerged in recent days from Digital Chat Station suggest that the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro, labeled as model number SM8975 will come at an estimated $300 320 per unit. This would represent an increment of over $20 on the previous 8 Elite Gen 5 unit price (SM8650) of $280 per unit. This price jump can primarily be attributed to the shift in fabrication technology, moving from the 4nm process to a far more expensive TSMC 2nm node.
A single 2nm wafer now costs about $30,000, almost 2x the amount it cost to produce a 3nm wafer. This increased cost is then being transferred directly to the manufacturers who must then raise their prices. Qualcomm is clearly split between two different generations of high end CPUs as it also announced the existence of the non pro variant SM8950. Only the Pro variant is confirmed to support both the new LPDDR6 memory and UFS 5.0 storage standards.
The new Adreno 850 graphics will receive an additional dedicated memory unit (18 MB) on the Pro variants, whereas the base Gen 6 version of the SoC is slated to feature the older LPDDR5X standard and an Adreno 845 GPU.
Market impact ofcomponent inflation: This increase in the cost of the main CPU is combined with the enormous inflation observed across the memory market DRAM costs grew 70% over the past year while internal storage costs rose by 100%. These combined costs will almost certainly be reflected in flagship device prices and could give MediaTek and its new Dimensity 9600 SoC another opportunity to offer powerful chipsets that are cheaper for manufacturers than Qualcomm's new 2nm SoCs.
In spite of the price increase, major manufacturers are already looking to incorporate new SoCs in their 2026/2027 devices and Samsung vivo OPPO Xiaomi and Honor are among those that would integrate the new chip. These brands will then have to weigh the high performance of the Adreno 850 core against a silicon unit that now costs more than $300 a first in the history of the Snapdragon 8 Elite series.
