HotHardware honcho Dave Altavilla is on site in Maui, Hawaii, at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit where the chip company has revealed its latest Snapdragon 8-family processors, known as "Snapragon 8 Elite" due to their inclusion of the same powerful Oryon CPU cores used in the speedy Snapdragon X Elite laptop chips.
As part of the reveal, Qualcomm gave out some benchmark data for the new chips. These benchmarks have two strikes against them, being both on a reference platform and vendor-provided, but Qualcomm's own benchmarks have historically been pretty realistic; the performance numbers we got from the Snapdragon X Elite reference platforms broadly lined up with our benchmark results for laptops so-equipped.
Let's waste as little time as possible and jump right into things: here are the benchmarks.
We'll start off the benchmark fiesta with a difficult-to-read chart that nonetheless includes a lot of interesting data. This is the "PCMark - Work 3.0" benchmark from Futuremark that attempts to measure how capable a given device is with regards to typical productivity workloads, like photo and video editing as well as data manipulation, web browsing, and writing.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite prototype takes away a win in this benchmark, but only just so. It offers extremely high results in the Web Browsing and Data Manipulation tests, while the Photo Editing and Video Editing results actually lag behind some of the other phones. It's still extremely fast overall, though.
Geekbench 6 remains a popular multi-platform benchmark that tests the performance of devices in a variety of short, bursty workloads. The tests have traditionally favored Apple, but can Qualcomm's new wunderkind dethrone the fruit company? Let's find out...
An incredible multi-core score easily puts Qualcomm's prototype at the top of the chart, though it still loses out in single-core performance compared to Apple's latest and greatest. However, Qualcomm wanted to prove that this was down to the configuration of the Snapdragon prototype handset and not a limitation of the chip. Check this out:
It's definitely an impressive result, but Qualcomm admits that this is a "slightly goosed" configuration that probably won't be coming to end users, at least in phones. This could be representative of performance for these chips in other form factors, like, say, gaming handhelds? On that topic...
The synthetic 3DMark tests really aren't a replacement for proper game benchmarks, but those are surprisingly hard to do on mobile platforms given the poor multi-tasking support in mobile OSes. So saying, we'll have to rely on 3DMark, which does give a fair impression of gaming graphics performance.
In the Wild Life Unlimited benchmark, which runs in a fixed resolution to fairly represent gaming performance across devices with disparate displays, the Snapdragon 8 Prototype absolutely blows everything else we've tested out of the water. That includes the iPhone 16 Pro, which actually doesn't put up a particularly impressive performance in 3DMark. There's more to this test than meets the eye, though.
You see, the 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited benchmark includes a stress test that shows you the kind of performance you'll get over time. You'll notice that the Snapdragon 8 Elite prototype manages a stability rating of 88.2%, meaning that over the course of the 20 benchmark runs the app performed, the lowest score was within 88.2% of the highest score. That bodes well for extended gaming sessions.
However, on the iPhone 16 Pro, benchmark stability is considerably worse, and it's actually even worse than it looks from that 71.5% number, because only the very first benchmark gave that score of 4438. (Note that the iPhone score is on the "Extreme" benchmark, which is why the scores are lower -- stability should be the same either way, though.) Performance drops off sharply on the second and later tests, and stays there.
Qualcomm also gave us data for the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme benchmark. We don't have a direct comparison against the iPhone 16 Pro here, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite prototype easily runs away from the rest of the Android devices we've tested in the past.
The venerable GFXBench is another popular cross-platform 3D graphics performance test. We have data on the Snapdragon 8 Elite in both the T-Rex and Aztec Ruins benchmarks. First up, T-Rex.
Unsurprisingly, the Snapdragon 8 Elite runs away with this one. Actually, the T-Rex test is an older test that still uses the OpenGL ES graphics API. It runs rather poorly on the iPhone 16 Pro, while the Android devices have no trouble with it. Of course, the Snapdragon 8 Elite dominates the competition here.
The new Qualcomm part's performance in GFXBench Aztec Ruins is even more dominating than in the T-Rex test. The Snapdragon development team has clearly optimized the chip's Vulkan driver for this test, as it runs away with nearly a 50% performance gain over its nearest competitor. The iPhone comports itself better in this test, likely due to the use of the device's native Metal graphics API, but it's still the slowest device on the chart in this benchmark.
We were quite impressed with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors in the laptops that we tested, at least when running native ARM64 apps. Given the explosive performance of the "SDXE", it comes as no surprise that the mobile chip using the same CPU cores is also lightning-quick. We noted before how Qualcomm compared its chips favorably to Intel's Lunar Lake processors, which are also very fast.
Of course, it has to be reiterated that these are pre-release, vendor-provided benchmarks on a reference platform. Qualcomm's arguably in a better position for this launch than for the release of the Snapdragon X Elite, though; there's no Prism emulation layer to worry about here. It's possible that we're really entering a new era of smartphone SoC performance, and we can't wait to have real devices in hand to see if the speed holds up.