An unannounced Qualcomm flagship chip has already shown up for sale on a Chinese secondhand marketplace, giving an early look at hardware that isn’t supposed to be officially revealed until late September 2026.
A Shenzhen-based seller briefly listed a chip identified as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro (model SM8975-100-BC) on Xianyu, China’s biggest secondhand platform. The listing called it a desoldered engineering sample taken from a test board and put a placeholder price of CNY 300 (about $42), with the real price open to negotiation. It was marketed for repair and chip rework, and the seller claimed bulk stock was available. The post disappeared shortly after it went up.
The SM8975 model number matches what had previously been linked to Qualcomm’s higher-end flagship silicon for this generation. Qualcomm has already teased that its next Snapdragon Summit will introduce two separate “8 Elite” chips instead of the usual single one, briefly showing a pair of Snapdragon 8 Elite-branded packages in promotional material ahead of the September 22–24 event in Maui, Hawaii.
Package markings on the listed chips give a few more clues. The laser-etched “SM8975-100-BC” points to a first-revision LPDDR5X engineering sample. Two lot codes appear: FC5528M5 and FX602R8T. These usually encode the fabrication plant, assembly site, and packaging date. Decoding them suggests both were made at TSMC (likely on the N2P node) and packaged at Amkor facilities, one in Korea around late December 2025 and the other in Japan in early January 2026. Samples are said to have reached OEMs starting February 3, 2026.
The photos also show an internal heat spreader sitting between the die and the package lid. This looks like Qualcomm’s answer to Samsung’s Heat Pass Block design used on the Exynos 2600. The spreader appears smaller than Samsung’s version, probably because Qualcomm’s package has to support both LPDDR6 and LPDDR5X memory options, which means larger ball-grid arrays and less room for the heat solution.
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