OnePlus is gearing up to launch its next flagship in China, and the company has now confirmed key details about what's powering it.
Ahead of the official unveiling, OnePlus revealed the phone's design and colour options and opened pre-orders on its website. The latest confirmation centers on performance: the OnePlus 16 will run on Qualcomm's newly announced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 series chip, built using a 2nm manufacturing process.
A Custom Chip Variant Built For Gaming
According to a Weibo announcement from the company, the specific chip going into the OnePlus 16 is an octa-core variant called the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, featuring two prime cores, three performance cores and three efficiency cores, with peak clock speeds reaching 5.0GHz.
OnePlus is pairing this chip with what it's calling a "Wind Chaser Gaming Kernel", a custom software layer aimed at squeezing out extra gaming performance. Together, the company claims this combination can push frame rates as high as 185 fps in supported titles.
Benchmark Numbers Suggest A Big Performance Jump
A device carrying the model number PYB110, reportedly the OnePlus 16, has already surfaced on the AnTuTu benchmarking platform. Per a report from TheTechOutlook, the device posted an overall score of 5,384,433, with 1,458,283 points coming from CPU performance testing and 2,010,584 from GPU testing.
The listing showed the phone running Android 17 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. For comparison, the OnePlus 15 scored 3,635,346 on an earlier version of the same benchmarking tool, suggesting a substantial generational leap if these early numbers hold up.
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Launch Timing And Configurations
OnePlus is expected to formally launch the phone in October, but the company has scheduled a dedicated OnePlus Game Conference for September 28 to share more performance details ahead of that. The event kicks off at 10 a.m. local time, translating to 7:30 a.m. IST. The phone is currently listed for pre-order through Oppo's China online store in three colour options: Tomorrow's Star, Martian Masterpiece, and Dark Forest, and will reportedly be available in four memory and storage configurations, ranging from 12GB/256GB up to 16GB/1TB.
A Separate Gaming Phone May Be Coming To India
Apart from the standard OnePlus 16 launch, a separate claim from tipster Ashok Mor suggests OnePlus is working on an entirely different gaming-focused smartphone specifically for the Indian market. That device is rumoured to include an RGB lighting setup and an active cooling fan, and could ship running Android 17-based ColorOS 17. OnePlus has not confirmed this device or its India launch plans.
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