First Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 benchmarks appear
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is the processor that will end up in most flagship phones of 2022, and it already made its official debut as standalone silicon last week, but now, the first benchmarks of the chip in action have appeared and show us how the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 compares to the Snapdragon 888 and the Apple A15 Bionic.
Benchmark results were published by PCMag, which attended the Qualcomm event where a reference platform device with the new chip was tested.
The most interesting numbers come in the form of Geekbench 5 scores. Geekbench is a cross-platform CPU performance benchmark that gives out two results: one for single-core performance, and another one for multi-core performance. Keep in mind that scores vary ever so slightly between runs, but we are seeing fairly consistent results across the board, so we will just pick one of those and you can see how it compares with Snapdragon 888 devices and Apple A15 Bionic iPhones below:
Snapdgragon 8 Gen 1 CPU Performance Benchmarks
| Processor | GeekBench 5 Single-core | GeekBench 5 Multi-core |
|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Gen1 (Qualcomm Reference device) | 1,235 | 3,837 |
| Snapdragon 888 (Galaxy S21 Ultra, OnePlus 9 Pro, others) | 1,100 | 3,500 |
| Apple A15 Bionic (iPhone 13 series) | 1,730 | 4,700 |
| Apple A14 Bionic (iPhone 12 series) | 1,600 | 4,300 |
| Apple A13 Bionic (iPhone 11 series) | 1,330 | 3,440 |
| Google Tensor (Pixel 6 and 6 Pro) | 1,040 | 2,830 |
As you can see from these results, the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is more than 10% faster compared to the current Snapdragon 888 in single and multi-core performance. Still, these numbers are not quite the 20% CPU improvement that Qualcomm promised earlier.
At the same time, it still falls short compared to Apple's A15 Bionic, and in fact, looking at the benchmark scores, we can see that it only barely beats the Apple A13 chip from two years ago in multi-core performance and still comes short to it in single-core benchmarks. It's quite clear that at this point in time, Qualcomm is far behind Apple in terms of CPU performance.
Of course, we cannot expect giant leaps in performance, and we'll take this 10% improvement along with quite the few new capabilities that the Snadragon 8 Gen 1 enables.
Also, we should not forget that these benchmark scores above were produced on a reference device and not an actual phone that will end up in consumer hands. Qualcomm also clarifies that its chip isn't designed for the kind of burst performance measurements that benchmarks focus on, but is instead optimized for sustained performance.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 GPU and Gaming Performance
While CPU performance testing did not yield super impressive results, the GPU did and that means that gamers will be in for a treat.
In the GFXBench 5 Aztec Ruins offscreen test, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 finished with a result of 45 frames per second, higher than the iPhone 13 Pro Max, which had 36fps.
Other phones were far behind, and for example, the Galaxy S21 Ultra only scored 19fps on the same test, which means the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 deliver more than double the performance.
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