Retroid Pocket 6 vs Pocket 5: The $30 Flagship Gap, 2026

Retroid spent four product generations teaching its audience to expect incremental, sensible, slightly-cheaper-than-it-should-be hardware. Then, in October 2025, it announced the Retroid Pocket 6 and quietly relocated the goalposts into the parking lot. Pre-orders reportedly opened October 27, 2025, with a launch targeted for January 2026, and the headline number was a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 bolted into a $229 Android handheld. That is not an iteration. That is Retroid deciding it would like to be mentioned in the same sentence as devices that cost twice as much, and then pricing the device so that the comparison becomes embarrassing for everyone but Retroid.

This piece exists because the more interesting fight is not Retroid versus Valve, or Retroid versus AYANEO, or Retroid versus whatever Anbernic shipped on a Tuesday. The more interesting fight is Retroid versus Retroid. The Pocket 5 still sells for $199. The Pocket Flip 2 sells for $209 with the same internals. The Pocket Mini V2 exists for people who want a Game Boy Micro that runs GameCube. And the Pocket 6, at $229 (or $209 on the launch discount), invalidates roughly half of that catalog while sitting on the same store page next to it. So the question every buyer is actually asking — and the question every breathless launch post declined to answer — is whether the $30 gap between the Pocket 5 and the Pocket 6 buys you thirty dollars of handheld, or three hundred. We are going to answer that with the only thing that matters: the spec deltas, the silicon generations, and the workloads that actually break.

The Pitch, Decoded

Strip the marketing copy and the Pocket 6's pitch is a single sentence: this is the first Retroid that is a budget Android gaming PC wearing a retro handheld's clothes. Every spec on the sheet supports that reading. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a 2023 flagship phone chip — the same family that powered that year's Galaxy and a wall of gaming phones — and it is a generational leap over the Snapdragon 865 that has carried Retroid's flagship line since the Pocket 4 era. The 5.5-inch AMOLED panel at 1920x1080 with a 120 Hz refresh ceiling is not a retro-handheld display; it is a small phone display, and it is one of the best screens Retroid has ever shipped. The 8 GB or 12 GB of LPDDR5X RAM on UFS 3.1 storage, the 6,000 mAh battery with 27 W fast charging, the active cooling, the Wi-Fi 7, the Bluetooth 5.3 — none of these are choices you make for a device whose ceiling is Super Nintendo. These are choices you make for a device you expect to run Switch emulation, PS2 at internal-resolution multipliers, cloud streaming, and the increasingly large category of native Android games that ship with controller support.

That repositioning matters because it changes who the Pocket 5 is for. Six months ago the Pocket 5 was Retroid's high end and you bought it if you wanted the ceiling. Today the Pocket 5 is the value flagship and the Pocket 6 is the ceiling, and that demotion happened without the Pocket 5 changing a single component. This is the oldest trick in consumer electronics — make the old flagship look thrifty by standing a new one next to it — and Retroid executes it cleanly because the price gap is small enough to feel like a rounding error and the spec gap is large enough to feel like a tier change. The trap, and it is a trap, is assuming the small price gap implies a small capability gap. It does not. Wikipedia's Retroid Pocket model history lays out the lineage plainly, and the through-line is that Retroid changes the SoC rarely and deliberately. When it does, the device that gets the new chip is not a refresh. It is a new class of machine.

So we will treat it as one. The rest of this article assumes you already understand that the Pocket 6 is faster — that is trivially true and uninteresting. The interesting questions are: faster at what, by how much in the workloads people actually run, and whether the supporting cast of upgrades (the screen, the cooling, the battery, the M1/M2 buttons) compounds the silicon advantage into something worth a real recommendation or just a spec-sheet flex.

The Spec Sheet, Side by Side

Here is the full comparison across the four 2025–2026 Retroid devices that matter to this decision. Read it once for the SoC row and once for the display row; those two lines explain most of the price structure. Everything sourced below comes from Retroid's own product pages and the launch coverage cited at the end.

Three rows do the heavy lifting. The SoC row is the entire argument — one device is on a 2023 flagship, three are on a 2020 flagship. The RAM row is the quiet tell: LPDDR5X on the Pocket 6 versus LPDDR4x on the 865 devices is not just a capacity bump to 12 GB, it is a bandwidth and efficiency change that matters specifically for the memory-hungry emulators (Switch, PS2 at high upscales) where the 865 devices already feel the pinch. And the battery row — 6,000 mAh with 27 W charging versus a flat 5,000 mAh — is the difference between a device built for two-hour sessions and one built to survive a transcontinental flight running the heaviest cores you can throw at it.

Notice what does not change. UFS 3.1 storage is constant across the slab devices, so load times and save-state write speeds will not be a differentiator. Android 13 is constant across the entire lineup, which means the software ecosystem — RetroArch, the standalone emulators, the launchers like Daijisho and ES-DE, the streaming clients — is identical. You are not buying into a different software world with the Pocket 6. You are buying a faster engine under the same chassis and the same dashboard. That is good news for anyone migrating, and we will get to migration.

Silicon: 8 Gen 2 vs 865

Everything downstream of this section is a consequence of one decision Retroid made: which Qualcomm part to solder down. So let us be precise about the gap, because "newer is faster" is the kind of analysis that gets people to spend $229 and then ask why their Switch games still stutter.

The Snapdragon 865 launched as a 2020 flagship. It has aged into the de facto baseline for serious Android emulation precisely because it was a competent, widely-deployed chip with a mature driver story — emulator developers know it, profile against it, and ship workarounds for its quirks. It runs the entire 8-bit and 16-bit catalog without breaking a sweat, handles PSP and Dreamcast and Saturn comfortably, runs the GameCube/Wii layer well, manages a large fraction of the PS2 library at native or 2x internal resolution, and gets you into Switch emulation — where "gets you into" is doing a lot of work, because Switch emulation on an 865 is a per-title negotiation involving settings, expectations, and occasional prayer. The 865 is not the problem. The 865 is the floor, and the floor is high.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is three flagship generations newer. The CPU cores are faster and, more importantly for emulation, the prime core is dramatically stronger in single-thread throughput — and single-thread performance is the metric that actually governs heavy interpreter and recompiler workloads, because the hot path in most emulators does not parallelize cleanly. The GPU is a generational leap, which is what lets you push internal-resolution multipliers and post-processing shaders without surrendering frame rate. And the memory subsystem — the LPDDR5X we flagged earlier — feeds that faster compute without starving it. The net effect is that workloads which were a per-title negotiation on the 865 become a default-on experience on the 8 Gen 2, and workloads that were impossible on the 865 (the genuinely heavy Switch and late PS2 titles at upscaled resolution) move from "no" to "frequently yes."

The honest caveat, and the one the launch hype skipped: a faster chip does not fix an emulator's bugs. Switch emulation in particular is bounded as much by software maturity, shader compilation stutter, and per-game compatibility as it is by raw silicon. A faster SoC reduces shader-comp hitching and raises the resolution ceiling, but it does not turn an unsupported title into a supported one. Ars Technica's ongoing coverage of Android emulation and the legal climate around it is the necessary reading here: the hardware is increasingly not the limiting factor; the software and the legal weather are. Buy the 8 Gen 2 for the headroom it gives mature emulators, not for a promise that every title in every system will Just Work. The Machine has watched too many people conflate "my handheld is fast" with "emulation is solved." Those are different sentences.

Display, Controls, and the Hall-Effect Question

The screens are, on paper, near-identical: both the Pocket 6 and the Pocket 5 use a 5.5-inch AMOLED 1080p panel. AMOLED is the correct choice for retro content — the absolute blacks make CRT-shader work and the dark dungeons of the PS1 era look the way they are supposed to look, and 1080p is enough pixels that integer-scaling a 240p source produces clean, evenly-weighted scanlines instead of the shimmering mess you get on awkward resolutions. Where the Pocket 6 pulls ahead is the 120 Hz refresh ceiling. For retro content this is mostly irrelevant — a 60 fps source on a 60 Hz panel is already correct, and most pre-2000 systems run at or below 60 — but for the Pocket 6's stated ambitions it matters: high-refresh native Android games, cloud and remote-play streaming, and the UI itself all benefit, and 120 Hz is one of those specs that you stop noticing in the content and start noticing the instant you go back to 60 Hz menus.

The control story is where Retroid's premium-aspiration reveals itself most clearly, and it is worth understanding because it is the single most durability-relevant decision on the whole device. Both flagships use 3D Hall-effect analog sticks. Hall-effect sensors read stick position via magnetic field rather than physical contact, which means there is nothing to wear out and therefore — in principle — no stick drift, the failure mode that has plagued contact-based potentiometer sticks across an entire console generation. The Pocket 6 extends Hall sensing to the triggers and L2/R2, giving you genuine analog triggers that resist wear the same way the sticks do. The Pocket 5 has analog triggers; the Pocket 6 has Hall-effect analog triggers. That is a real, if narrow, durability and precision advantage, and it is the kind of thing that does not matter on day one and matters enormously in year three. The Flip 2, to its credit, also ships 3D Hall sticks and analog L2/R2, which is why it has held its value as a form-factor alternative rather than a downgrade.

Then there are the programmable M1 and M2 buttons, which the Pocket 6 adds and the Pocket 5 does not have as standard. These are back/extra buttons you can map to anything — and the reason they appear on the spec sheet of more expensive handhelds is that serious emulation users live in remappable space. A back button mapped to a save-state, a fast-forward toggle, or the menu hotkey is the difference between a device you fight and a device you operate. M1/M2 are not glamorous, but they are exactly the kind of detail that signals Retroid built the Pocket 6 for people who will configure it, not just unbox it. If you map carefully, the practical control gap between the two devices is wider than "two extra buttons" suggests, because those two buttons absorb the hotkey duties that otherwise eat your face buttons or force awkward chords.

Performance: What the Numbers Actually Say

Here is where The Machine declines to invent benchmark scores, because the internet has enough of those already and most of them are screenshots of a single run on a device with an unknown thermal state. What we have instead are the spec deltas — which are real, sourced, and predictive — and the consistent shape of community-reported behavior across three kinds of sources: the r/retroid subreddit, where people post per-game settings and frame-rate impressions; the GitHub issue trackers for the major emulators, where developers discuss which SoC tiers clear which workloads; and the official emulator documentation and Retroid's own spec pages. Read across those three and a coherent picture emerges. Here is the practical performance table, organized by system tier rather than by fabricated FPS, because the FPS that matters is per-title and the tier behavior is what generalizes.

The table tells the whole story if you read the right-hand column. For everything up to and including the sixth console generation's lighter end, the two devices are functionally identical — the 865 was already overkill for PS1 and the 8 Gen 2 is more overkill, and there is no experience to be had on the Pocket 6 in those tiers that the Pocket 5 cannot deliver. The differentiation lives entirely in PS2 at high upscales, Switch, and the modern Android/streaming workloads. If your library does not include those three categories, the Pocket 6's silicon advantage is, for you, a benchmark you will never run.

Three sourced observations to ground this. First, from the pattern of r/retroid per-game threads: 865-class devices generate enormous, detailed settings discussions for Switch and heavy PS2, because those tiers require tuning to run well — which is itself evidence that they are at the edge of the chip's envelope. Second, from the GitHub issue trackers for the major PS2 and Switch emulators: developers consistently describe the prime-core single-thread performance of newer Snapdragon parts as the variable that moves titles from "unplayable" to "playable," which is precisely the axis on which the 8 Gen 2 beats the 865. Third, from Retroid's own spec sheets and the launch coverage: the move to LPDDR5X and active cooling on a 6,000 mAh battery is the supporting infrastructure that lets the chip sustain its performance rather than thermal-throttle into mediocrity after twenty minutes — a failure mode that has historically capped sustained emulation on smaller, passively-cooled handhelds. The cooling and battery are not separate features; they are what make the silicon's peak performance into the silicon's sustained performance.

The thing the spec sheet cannot tell you — and the thing every benchmark screenshot hides — is sustained thermal behavior, and it is the single most important real-world performance question. A chip that benchmarks 40% faster but throttles back to parity after fifteen minutes of GameCube has given you a 40% faster loading screen and nothing else. The Pocket 6's active cooling plus its larger battery is the part of the pitch that should reassure you here, because it suggests Retroid sized the thermal solution to the chip rather than reusing the Pocket 5's. Verify it in long-session reviews before you treat the peak numbers as the steady-state numbers. Mainstream handheld coverage from outlets like Engadget is useful for sanity-checking the headline claims against measured behavior, even when the deep emulation testing happens on the enthusiast channels.

Pricing and Availability

The prices are the cleanest facts in this entire analysis, and they are also the facts that make the recommendation hard, because the gaps are small in absolute dollars and large in capability.

Stare at this table and the absurdity becomes visible. The Pocket 6 on its $209 launch discount costs the same as the Flip 2 at $209 and ten dollars more than the Pocket 5 at $199 — and it is, at that promotional price, three flagship silicon generations ahead of both. That is the kind of pricing that does not survive contact with arithmetic: at $209, the only reason to buy a Pocket 5 or Flip 2 is that you specifically want the slab-but-cheaper or the clamshell form factor, because the value argument has evaporated. The $30 list-price gap ($199 to $229) is the gap that requires thought; the $0 promotional gap requires none.

The standing advice on availability with Retroid is the same as it has always been: the company does limited production runs, sells direct, and the discount windows are genuinely time-boxed rather than permanent fake-MSRP theater. If the $209 promo is live, the decision is trivial. If it has expired and you are looking at $229 versus $199, you are back in the genuine-tradeoff zone that the rest of this article exists to resolve. And as always with direct-from-China handhelds: factor import duties, the absence of meaningful local warranty support, and shipping timelines into the real cost. The sticker is not the price. The sticker plus your patience plus your customs regime is the price.

Five Real-World Use Cases

Specs are abstract. People are not. Here are five concrete buyers and the correct device for each, because the right answer is never "the fastest one" — it is "the one matched to the library and the body."

1. The 16-bit purist who stops at the PS1 era. You play SNES, Genesis, PS1, GBA, and maybe some N64 and PSP. You want clean integer scaling, CRT shaders that do not chug, and a battery that lasts a long flight. Buy the Pocket 5, or honestly the Pocket Mini V2. The 8 Gen 2 in the Pocket 6 is silicon you will never load. Every dollar of its premium is buying performance in tiers you do not visit. The 865 is profoundly overpowered for your library, and the AMOLED 1080p panel is identical to the Pocket 6's for your content. Spend the savings on a faster SD card and a case.

2. The PS2-and-GameCube generalist. Your collection's center of mass is the sixth generation — PS2, GameCube, Wii, Dreamcast — and you want to run it at upscaled resolution without per-game tuning sessions. Buy the Pocket 6. This is precisely the band where the 8 Gen 2 converts the Pocket 5's "playable with tuning" into "default-on with headroom," and where the LPDDR5X and active cooling keep that performance sustained across a real session. This buyer is the median Pocket 6 customer and the one for whom the upgrade most clearly pays.

3. The Switch-curious maximalist. You want the heaviest workload Android emulation currently offers, you understand it is a per-title negotiation, and you want the device most likely to win those negotiations. Buy the Pocket 6, 12 GB. Switch emulation is the workload that most rewards single-thread CPU performance, GPU headroom, and memory bandwidth simultaneously, and the 8 Gen 2 plus 12 GB of LPDDR5X is the strongest combination in Retroid's lineup. Set your expectations with the emulator's compatibility list, not with the spec sheet, but if any Retroid is going to satisfy you, it is this one.

4. The clamshell loyalist who wants pocketable protection. You travel, you toss the device in a bag, and you want the screen protected by a fold rather than by a separate case. Form factor is non-negotiable for you. Buy the Flip 2. The 865 inside it is the same chip as the Pocket 5, which means it clears everything up through the sixth generation comfortably and negotiates Switch the same way. You are trading the 8 Gen 2's headroom for a hinge, and if the hinge is what keeps the device with you, that is a rational trade. The Flip 2's official OTA support is a real convenience here too.

5. The ultra-portable EDC carrier. You want something genuinely pocketable — a device that disappears into a jacket and comes out for a subway ride. The 5.5-inch slabs are too big for that life. Buy the Pocket Mini V2. Its 3.92-inch AMOLED, 865, and 4,000 mAh battery make it a competent everything-up-through-PSP machine in a body you will actually carry, which is the only spec that matters for a device whose entire job is to be present. The Pocket 6 is the better handheld; the Mini V2 is the one in your pocket. Presence beats power for this buyer every time.

What the Community Actually Argues

The Machine does not put words in real people's mouths, so what follows are the established positions of named voices and communities in this space, paraphrased from their consistent public stances rather than invented as verbatim quotes. Treat them as characterizations, verify against the source, and notice how often the experienced voices land on the same caveat.

Retro Game Corps (Russ Crandall). The most influential voice in the budget handheld space has spent years making the same argument in a hundred forms: buy for your library, not for the spec ceiling, and the form factor matters more than buyers expect. Applied to this comparison, that position translates cleanly — the Pocket 6 is the right call for sixth-gen-and-up libraries, and a category error for anyone whose collection tops out at PS1, no matter how good the chip benchmarks.

ETA Prime. The enthusiast channel that has tested more Android handhelds than most people have owned consistently emphasizes one thing the spec sheets bury: sustained thermals and per-title settings are where the real performance lives. The position that follows is that a generational SoC jump like the 865-to-8-Gen-2 only pays off if the cooling and power delivery let the chip hold its clocks — which is exactly why the Pocket 6's active cooling and 6,000 mAh battery are load-bearing parts of its pitch, not garnish.

The r/retroid consensus. The subreddit's collective behavior is its own opinion. The sheer volume of per-game settings threads for Switch and heavy PS2 on 865 devices is a community telling you, through a thousand individual posts, that those tiers sit at the edge of the chip's envelope. The mirror-image observation is that nobody posts settings threads for SNES, because nothing needs them. That asymmetry is the most honest performance review in existence.

The emulator developers. Across the GitHub trackers for the major PS2 and Switch projects, the developers' recurring position is that single-thread CPU throughput and driver maturity gate the heavy workloads more than raw GPU horsepower — which is a quiet argument for the 8 Gen 2's stronger prime core and against assuming any fast chip is interchangeable. It is also a reminder that the emulator's compatibility list, not the handheld's spec sheet, is the document that predicts whether your specific game runs.

The mainstream tech press. Outlets like Engadget and Ars Technica approach these devices from outside the enthusiast bubble, and their consistent framing is the one buyers most need: the hardware has largely outrun the software and the legal climate, so the interesting questions about an emulation handheld in 2026 are increasingly about what you are legally entitled to run on it and how mature the emulator is — not whether the silicon can keep up. That reframing is the adult in the room, and it applies to the Pocket 6 more than any prior Retroid, precisely because the Pocket 6 is fast enough that the chip stops being the excuse.

The pattern across all five is unmistakable: the people who know the most are the least excited about the raw number and the most insistent on the qualifiers. That is usually a sign the qualifiers are where the truth is.

Migrating From a Pocket 5 (or 4)

Because the entire lineup runs Android 13 and the same software ecosystem, migrating from a Pocket 5 (or a Pocket 4) to a Pocket 6 is mercifully boring — which is exactly what you want from a migration. There is no new OS to learn, the same emulators install from the same sources, and your settings concepts transfer one-to-one. What you are moving is data: ROMs, BIOS files, save files, save states, and per-emulator configuration. Here is the order of operations that avoids the two classic failures — losing saves, and re-downloading content you already had.

Step one: back up the old device fully before you touch the new one. The cardinal rule of any migration is that the source device stays untouched and intact until the destination is verified working. Pull everything off the Pocket 5 to a computer first.

# On a computer with adb installed, with the Pocket 5 connected
# and USB debugging enabled (Settings > Developer options):

adb devices                    # confirm the device shows up

# Pull the entire emulation tree to a local backup folder.
# Adjust the path to wherever your front-end stores content.
adb pull /sdcard/Roms ./rp5-backup/Roms
adb pull /sdcard/RetroArch ./rp5-backup/RetroArch
adb pull /sdcard/Android/data ./rp5-backup/standalone-data

# The standalone emulators (PS2, GameCube, Switch cores) keep
# saves and memory cards under their own package folders in
# Android/data — do NOT skip this directory or you lose them.

Step two: separate the three kinds of files in your head. ROMs and BIOS are replaceable content — move them for convenience, but losing them costs only download time. Save files and save states are irreplaceable and live in different places depending on the emulator: RetroArch keeps them in its own saves/states folders, while standalone emulators (the ones you use for PS2, GameCube, and Switch) keep them inside their package directories under Android/data. The single most common migration disaster is copying the ROMs, booting a game on the new device, and discovering the hundred hours of saves stayed behind because they lived in a package folder nobody thought to pull. Pull Android/data. Pull it twice.

Step three: transfer to the Pocket 6 and rebuild the front-end. Push your backed-up tree to the Pocket 6, reinstall RetroArch and your standalone emulators, and point them at the transferred folders.

# On the Pocket 6, connected to the same computer:

adb push ./rp5-backup/Roms /sdcard/Roms
adb push ./rp5-backup/RetroArch /sdcard/RetroArch
adb push ./rp5-backup/standalone-data /sdcard/Android/data

# Then, on-device:
#  1. Install RetroArch + standalone emulators (same versions/newer)
#  2. Re-scan your ROM directories in your front-end
#     (Daijisho / ES-DE / native launcher)
#  3. Verify a save and a save state load in EACH emulator
#     BEFORE you wipe or sell the Pocket 5
#  4. Re-pair Bluetooth controllers; re-enter Wi-Fi networks
#     (Wi-Fi 7 on the RP6 is new — reconnect, don't assume)

Step four — the part you will actually enjoy: re-tune, do not copy. This is the one place where you should not mechanically transfer settings. Your Pocket 5 configs were tuned to the 865's limits — conservative internal-resolution multipliers, frame-skip compromises, disabled enhancements you turned off to hold 60. On the 8 Gen 2 those compromises are leftover scar tissue. Start each heavy emulator (PS2, GameCube, Switch) from a clean profile and raise the settings the new silicon can now afford: higher internal resolution, the post-processing you previously disabled, the upscale you previously could not hold. Copying the old conservative configs forward is the single most common way new Pocket 6 owners fail to notice they bought a faster device. And re-map your M1 and M2 buttons immediately — they did not exist on the Pocket 5, so there is no config to migrate; assign them to your save-state and fast-forward hotkeys on day one and the device feels twice as ergonomic.

Migrating the other direction — from a Pocket 6 down to a 5 or Flip 2, say if you are gifting the new one and keeping a backup — is the same process in reverse, with one warning: settings tuned to the 8 Gen 2 will overwhelm the 865, so you will need to dial heavy-emulator settings back down rather than up. Same data, opposite tuning direction.

Pros and Cons, Per Device

The compressed version, for the buyer who scrolled straight here. No hedging.

The Verdict

Here is the data-backed recommendation, stated without the hedging the launch posts hid behind.

If the Pocket 6's $209 launch discount is live, buy it and stop reading. At $209 it is the same price as the Flip 2 and ten dollars over the Pocket 5, while being three flagship silicon generations ahead, with a better battery, better wireless, Hall-effect triggers, and two extra programmable buttons. There is no value-based argument against it at that price. The only reasons to buy something else at $209 are non-performance reasons: you specifically want the Flip 2's clamshell, or the Mini V2's true pocketability. Both are legitimate. Neither is about speed.

If you are looking at the full $229 versus the Pocket 5's $199 — the genuine $30 gap — the answer is your library. If your collection's center of mass is PS2, GameCube, Wii, or Switch, pay the $30. It is the best-spent thirty dollars in the entire Retroid catalog, because it is the exact band where the 8 Gen 2 converts "playable with tuning" into "default-on with headroom," and where the LPDDR5X, active cooling, and 6,000 mAh battery turn peak performance into sustained performance. If your collection tops out at PS1, N64, PSP, and Dreamcast, the Pocket 5 is not a compromise — it is the correct device, and the Pocket 6's silicon premium is buying you horsepower in tiers you will never load. Spending $30 more for performance you cannot use is not an upgrade. It is a tax you volunteered for.

The deeper point, and the one The Machine will leave you with: the Pocket 6 is the first Retroid where the chip is no longer the excuse. On the 865 devices, when a game ran badly you could shrug and blame the silicon. On the 8 Gen 2, the silicon is fast enough that the limiting factors become the emulator's maturity, the per-title compatibility, and — increasingly — the legal climate around what you are entitled to run, the territory Ars Technica keeps documenting. That is a more honest, and more uncomfortable, place for the hobby to be. The hardware has done its job. Retroid built a $229 handheld that runs nearly everything the Android emulation scene can throw at it, sustained, on a beautiful screen, for a long time. Whether the scene's software and the law keep pace is no longer Retroid's problem to solve. It is ours. Buy accordingly, tune ruthlessly, and stop blaming the chip.