Every year, we hear big talk from chip makers like Qualcomm about how good their new chipsets are. But can it beat Apple’s latest and greatest?
Well, ahead of today’s announcement, we got the chance to benchmark a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 reference design device against the iPhone 17 Pro Max. And the scores are very similar. The iPhone 17 Pro Max scored between 3600-3850 on the single-core Geekbench test, and around 9,000 to 10,000 on the multi-core. While on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 it was scoring the same range in the single-core and the GPU was up to 23,000. That’s still about half of what the iPhone does in GPU, but keep in mind that the Geekbench GPU test is different on iOS versus Android.
| Device | Geekbench 6 Single-core | Geekbench 6 Multi-core | Geekbench 6 GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 QRD | 3,739 | 12,101 | 23,721 |
| Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max | 3,638 | 9,462 | 45,836 |
Over on AnTuTu, it’s a totally different story, however. We’ve been getting around 2.3 to 2.5 million on AnTuTu on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 was getting between 4 and 4.5 million. That’s almost double what the A19 Pro is able to accomplish, which is quite impressive, to be perfectly honest.
| Device | AnTuTu |
|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 QRD | 4,084,711 |
| Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max | 2,332,390 |
So can the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 keep up with the latest from Apple? It sure can. But keep in mind that this kind of power is more than enough for most people, and you’ll likely never even be able to use all of this power.
About Qualcomm’s reference design
This year, Qualcomm did provide a purple one, which looks great, and it runs on AOSP. The specs include a 6.8-inch WQHD+ 1-120Hz AMOLED display, 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM at 5.3GHz, and 1TB of UFS4.1 storage. It also has a pretty small 4.3Ah battery inside.
Also keep in mind that benchmarks really don’t tell the whole story of a new chip. We’ll have to wait for some of Qualcomm’s partners to release their devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 to see how well it is actually performing, especially with AI features.
