For the first time in, perhaps ever, the latest Qualcomm flagship silicon is now benchmarking at the same level as Apple’s chips, and even higher in some tests. So how was Qualcomm able to do it? Well, luckily, Qualcomm was able to explain just how this happened here at Snapdragon Summit this week.
Qualcomm stated during its Mobile Q&A session at Snapdragon Summit, that there were a lot of “conscious decisions that had to be made to get the best out of these prime cores”. The designers at Qualcomm have “made quite a few changes,” including some tradeoffs that were made, but Qualcomm did not want to compromise power and efficiency. They did stress that they do not focus on synthetic benchmarks.
Of course, a big part of this is also the new N3P process from TSMC that is being used for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (the same process as the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 and the A19 Pro that’s found in the iPhone 17 Pro Max). Higher clock speeds also help the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 perform better in benchmarks like GFXBench, Geekbench and AnTuTu as well.
Benchmarks aren’t the end-all, be-all
While its great to see higher numbers when you benchmark your device, it’s important to remember that benchmarks aren’t the end-all, be-all for performance.
Especially today, these processors are so powerful that you will never really be able to use all of the power that it can provide. For most things, benchmark results are still just bragging rights. But it is good to see that Android now has a chip that can compete with the latest from Apple. Which is a long time coming. Because for quite some time, Android was far behind Apple in terms of raw performance, now it’s just Pixel that is far behind with its Tensor chips.
