Snapdragon 8 Elite Geekbench, other benchmarks put gains in perspective

Qualcomm officially announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset earlier this week at the ongoing Snapdragon Summit 2024 in Maui, Hawaii. It's a big launch for the company as this is the first time that its custom Oryon cores have been integrated into its mobile platform. Qualcomm did say last year that it would bring Oryon to mobile in 2024 and it has followed through on that promise.

There were a lot of claims made regarding the gains during the launch with the company claiming a 45% improvement in both single-core and multi-core performance. We got the chance today to run Snapdragon 8 Elite Geekbench and various other benchmarks on reference devices provided by Qualcomm and the results really put these performance improvements in perspective.

Snapdragon 8 Elite benchmarks are impressive, to say the least

The reference devices provided by Qualcomm are running the Oryon performance cores at their maximum 4.32GHz clock and are paired with 24GB of LPDDR5x memory with 1TB UFS 4.0 storage. The company has repeatedly mentioned throughout the summit that it doesn't build chipsets to hit certain targets on benchmarks. It focuses instead on elevating end user experiences. Be that as it may, the new chipset is a scorcher on these benchmarks.

Our Snapdragon 8 Elite Geekbench result on a reference device yielded a single-core and multi-core score of 3171 and 10289 respectively. To put that in perspective, the Galaxy S24 Ultra which is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy globally hits 2238 and 6873 on Geekbench. That's an insane jump from the last generation and while, yes, benchmarks aren't necessarily representative of real-world performance, you can bet that Snapdragon 8 Elite devices are going to feel much faster those sporting last year's chipset.

On AnTuTu, we hit 3,015,087 whereas the previously generation hit scores of around 1,766,906 points on a Galaxy S24 Ultra. Qualcomm did point out during the keynote that this chipset consistently hits scores of above 3 million on AnTuTu.

The 3DMark Wild Life Extreme is a popular graphics performance test on which the Snapdragon 8 Elite device we ran the benchmark on scored 7,043 compared to the Galaxy S24's 4,931. It's pertinent to note here that benchmark scores can vary considerably between runs but the overarching theme here is that the Snapdragon 8 Elite easily outperforms its predecessor by double digit margins in key benchmarking applications.

How does all of this translate into real-world performance? It remains to be seen whether the consumer devices that use this chipset run the prime core at its peak clock, as that results in higher power draw, and it would also be interesting to see how that affects the performance per watt metrics of this chipset.

What's evident, though, is that this is a considerably more capable chipset when it comes to performance, regardless of any tweaks that OEMs like Samsung may require. With the entire Galaxy S25 series now expected to feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the next flagship lineup would certainly be in a league of its own.

Disclaimer: Qualcomm is hosting a large group of international media for the Snapdragon Summit 2024 from October 21-23 in Hawaii, including SamMobile. All opinions and analyses remain our own with Qualcomm receiving no advance preview or exercising any control over our coverage.