Newly Surfaced Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Outscores Apple's A19 Pro on Single-Core Performance, Outpacing Desktop Processors as Well
The technology world is abuzz with the announcement of Qualcomm's latest offering, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Manufactured in TSMC's advanced 3-nm N3P node, this SoC promises to deliver a significant leap in performance for Qualcomm's chips.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is equipped with two performance cores and six efficiency cores, a configuration that could potentially explain its reported score of 3,831 points on Geekbench. If these figures are reflective of shipping products, they would put the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in a league of its own.
The performance cores of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 can hit 4.61 GHz in the standard configuration and an impressive 4.74 GHz in a Samsung Galaxy-specific flavor. The chip is also rumoured to support the newer versions of Arm's Scalable Vector Instructions (SVE2) and Scalable Matrix Instructions (SME), which are designed to cover a broad range of use cases beyond AI-related data processing, including general-purpose software, multimedia, computer vision, and in-memory databases.
However, it's important to note that these reported figures originate from leakers and may not reflect the final production silicon, clock-speed targets, or power envelopes of their devices. The unnamed Xiaomi device, possibly the Xiaomi 17 Pro, that scored 3,831 points in Geekbench serves as a promising example, but it's crucial to approach these numbers with a degree of scepticism.
In comparison, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D score around 3,400 and 3,500 points, respectively, on Geekbench. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's score, if confirmed, would represent a substantial improvement.
It's also worth mentioning that Geekbench single-core results may not always accurately reflect general application performance in every scenario. For instance, the A19 Pro SoC scores close to 3,900 points in Geekbench, a figure comparable to the single-threaded Geekbench score of Apple's A19 Pro SoC inside the iPhone 17 Pro.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 marks the fifth generation of Snapdragon products, following the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, and the original Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4). Even if the final production Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices have lower scores, it would still represent an impressive showing.
In conclusion, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5's performance is promising based on leaked information, it's essential to wait for the official release and benchmarking of the final products to confirm its true capabilities.
