Once taken in its power, the Snapdragon 8 Elite may be very quickly looked at with a focus on one thing: power. However, the new Qualcomm chipset impacts other things besides speed: cameras, AI capabilities, and battery life. With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, users can thus prepare for the all-around upgrade that their mobile experience promises to bring.
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Performance is always the heart of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Qualcomm’s announcements have been long overdue. The chip employs a customized Oryon CPU, initially designed for connected devices before being re-moulded for the smartphone world. The outcome is stunning compared with the iPhone 16 Pro models driven by the Apple A18 Pro chipset.
While launching the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm boasts it can easily take down the recently released version from Apple based on published benchmarks. The key findings from data show that the Oryon CPU in Snapdragon 8 Elite has churned up a 45% boost in both single-core and multi-core performance in Geekbench 6 compared to its predecessor, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This would be a significant improvement, especially in processing power. Furthermore, the Adreno GPU benefits from a 40% graphics performance gain, which renders visuals smoother and silken.
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Qualcomm also lets the attendees of the Snapdragon Summit test these numbers in the reference device. This 6.8-inch was tailored in a standard setup off this chipset, featuring a CPU up to 4.32GHz and 24GB RAM. Several attendees were given the chance to consider the new chip’s actual performance using popular benchmarking tools.
Tom’s Guide typically employs Geekbench to assess a phone’s performance. Geekbench is simply a measure of how well a processor would handle various tasks in a single-core and multi-core scenario. Traditionally, Apple’s A-series chips have dominated these tests, but recent Snapdragon chips are rapidly narrowing the performance gap, especially with multi-core tasks. With Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm appears poised to continue closing that gap while giving Android fans a competitive powerhouse.
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Rather than emphasizing raw performance, the Snapdragon 8 Elite seeks to improve the user experience by improving AI capabilities, camera performance, and battery management. With such upgrades, Qualcomm’s new chipset provides a quite capable alternative to ensure that phones running on Snapdragon remain comparable with the latest offerings of Apple’s keenly compared devices.
| Device | Geekbench 6(single/multicore) | Speedometer 3 (Chrome) |
| Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device | 3,212 / 10,318 | 33.2 |
| Galaxy S24 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) | 2,300 / 7,249 | 16.3 |
| iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro) | 3,400 / 8,391 | 28.1 |
| iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 Pro) | 3,386 / 8306 | 27.8 |
The Snapdragon 8 Elite pushes performance. In our tests on a reference device, it compiled scores of 3,212 for single-core and 10,318 for multi-core performance. Multi-core, in particular, breaks the glass ceiling regarding mobile device performance in the mobile space, breaking through the 10,000 mark in that category and breaking new speed benchmarks.
