When talking about a new chipset like the Snapdragon 8 Elite, it is tempting to fixate on performance when there are so many other aspects of the mobile experience that the system-on-chip controls. In the case of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon, these include everything from the photos that can be taken with a device powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite to the AI experience enabled by the chipset to the charging time of the phone.

However, performance remains a big part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite story, and Qualcomm is happy to talk about it. The new chipset uses a customized mobile version of the Oryon CPU first released for connected computers, and the results are quite spectacular.

When it unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite earlier this week, Qualcomm released some of its own benchmarks for the new chip. According to Qualcomm, the Oryon CPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers a 45% performance improvement in both single-core and multi-core performance over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Geekbench 6 benchmark. The new chipset's Adreno GPU is expected to improve performance by 40%.

When I was Qualcomm's guest at this week's Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm provided a benchmark session where we could verify these numbers using a Qualcomm-provided reference device running the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This 6.8-inch reference device is running the standard configuration of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, with a CPU up to 4.32 GHz. The device also has 24 GB of RAM.

We ran general benchmarks on devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and found the following results.

When Tom's Guide tests a phone's overall performance, we use Geekbench, which measures the processor's single-core and multi-core power when performing various tasks. Apple's A-series chips have dominated this test for the past few years, but recent Snapdragon silicon has narrowed the gap, especially in multi-core performance.

With the Snapdragon 8 Elite, this improvement has accelerated even further. The average score for the reference device was 3,212 for single-core and 10,318 for multi-core. This multi-core result is particularly revealing because we have yet to see a mobile device surpass the 10,000 mark.

As you can imagine, these Snapdragon 8 Elite numbers are a significant improvement over the numbers produced by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the same test; the Snapdragon 8 Elite's results were even better than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered Galaxy S24 Ultra by 40% in single-core and 42% in multi-core.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite still trails Apple's A18 Pro chip in single-core results in Geekbench. iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max scored 3,400 and 3,386, respectively, outperforming Qualcomm's reference devices. However, in the multi-core test, the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max scored 8,391 and 8,306, respectively, with neither score falling far short of the Snapdragon 8 Elite's score.

We also ran Speedometer 3 on the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This is because this test can show how much faster browsing performance can be with a particular chipset. For consistent results, we ran Speedometer using Chrome.

The average Speedometer 3 score for the Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered device was 33.2, compared to 16.3 for the Galaxy S24 Ultra. iPhone 16 Pro scored 28.1 for the standard Pro, while the Pro Max recorded 27.8, which was slightly closer.

We use 3DMark's Wild Life test to look at graphics performance because it is a good way to compare devices running on iOS and Android. In this test, we are looking for phones that produce higher frame rates. We ran both the Unlimited version of the Wild Life graphics benchmark and the more demanding Extreme test to measure the performance of the Snapdragon 8 Elite's GPU.

In recent years, Snapdragon-powered phones have been outperforming iPhones in this test, a trend that certainly continued when we ran Wild Life on the Snapdragon 8 Elite test unit.

In Wild Life Unlimited, the Snapdragon 8 Elite device averaged 150.9 frames per second when running the test on-screen. This 150.9 fps result averaged 150.9 frames per second when running the test on-screen with the Snapdragon 8 Elite (there is also an off-screen option that delivers a higher frame rate, but it is not consistent with the phones we have tested in-house and We use the on-screen numbers for comparison purposes). This result of 150.9 fps was 24% better than the Galaxy S24 Ultra.

More importantly, the gap between the iPhone's performance in this test widened: the iPhone 16 Pro recorded 109.3 fps and the iPhone 16 Pro Max recorded 107.5. If the Snapdragon 8 Elite is used in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Samsung's new model will dominate the current iPhone in terms of graphics.

When running the Wild Life Unlimited Extreme test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite's 41.7 fps result was 39% faster than the Galaxy S24 Ultra and 81% faster than the iPhone 16 Pro.

AI capabilities are now a mainstay of smartphones, and much of this depends on the performance of the chipset's neural engine. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 8 Elite's neural engine is 45% faster than its predecessor.

To see what improvement that translates to, we turned to the AIMark benchmark. This benchmark uses ResNet-34, Inception-V3, Mobilenet-SSD, and DeepLab-v3+ models for image classification, recognition, and segmentation, with higher scores indicating better performance.

Qualcomm is right, the Snapdragon 8 Elite's neural engine is faster than what last year's chipset offered; in AiMark, the 8 Elite's score of 308,241 is 26% faster than the Galaxy S24 Ultra's score of 243,765 above. iPhones typically score much lower in AiMark, so a cross-platform comparison here would not be the most straightforward. There are also many other AI benchmarks that provide a more complete picture of neural performance. However, this AiMark test shows the generational leap between the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

When we review phones, we like to run real-world tests where we take video clips and transcode them to 1080p using Adobe Premiere Rush. The result is timed so that the better performing model completes the task faster than rival models. However, due to time and device limitations, we did not have the opportunity to run this transcoding test on a reference device powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

Traditionally, Apple's A-series chips have far outperformed Snapdragon-powered devices in this test. Most recently, the iPHone 16 Pro Max finished in 21 seconds, while the Galaxy S24 Ultra took 42 seconds. Of course, we will be very interested to see if the Snapdragon 8 Elite can shorten this time when we get a chance to fully test the first phone with Qualcomm's latest silicon.

When we spoke with Qualcomm's Chris Patrick about the Snapdragon 8 Elite, he described the new silicon as a “desktop-class CPU (with mobile-level power efficiency.)” Initial benchmarks with the Snapdragon 8 Elite runs confirmed that he was indeed right about the CPU's power.

More benchmarks will need to be run when devices with the Snapdragon 8 Elite are released, but for now, Qualcomm seems poised to take the mobile performance crown in early 2025. We'll see how Apple responds later this year.