In abstract
- Exams present the brand new Elite 8 Gen 5 is the quickest chip we’ve ever examined
- It beats the iPhone 17 Professional by over 30%
- It additionally seems to be much more of an improvment on the 8 Elite than Qualcomm claims
Qualcomm’s new flagship smartphone processor is official. On the Snapdragon Summit, we’ve been capable of benchmark the chip, confirming that it not solely beats Apple’s rival A19 Professional (which powers the iPhone 17 Professional), however thrashes it.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (not Elite 2 as anticipated) is touted because the ‘quickest cellular CPU on the earth’ and that may nicely be true. We’ve run some benchmarks and they’re significantly spectacular.
Apple’s top-end iPhones may be tough to beat in sure exams however simply try the outcomes beneath. It’s not even shut.
It’s value noting that we’re testing the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 on a reference design cellphone that may by no means be launched. Nonetheless, it does present a good suggestion of what telephones with the chip might be like.
The reference design shouldn’t be overclocked in any manner and we examined at room temperature in a convention room, with no particular lab situations that may enhance outcomes. We run exams many occasions and common scores to get rid of anomalies.
Relatedly, MediaTek simply introduced its new flagship Dimensity 9500, however we haven’t been capable of benchmark that for comparability.
Chris Martin / Foundry
Geekbench 6
We’re specializing in Geekbench 6 right here because it’s the benchmarking app we’ve used the longest at Tech Advisor and in addition as a result of it isn’t as affected by the opposite main bits of {hardware} that make up a cellphone just like the display screen.
With scores into the 12,000 vary, that is formally the quickest chip we’ve ever examined. It blows the iPhone 17 Professional (which we examined in the identical room on the identical time) out of the water, because it solely reached the 9,000 vary.
In comparison with the earlier era, it’s a powerful enchancment, even with the overclocked 8 Elite contained in the Galaxy S25 Extremely.
After we crunched the numbers, we discovered that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a whopping 30.6% quicker than the A19 Professional within the iPhone 17 Professional and 31% quicker than the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy within the Samsung Galaxy S25 Extremely.
This surpasses Qualcomm’s declare of a 20% CPU enchancment.
Single-core figures aren’t so spectacular, however they don’t matter half as a lot. The reference design system Qualcomm offered had a whopping 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, however reminiscence efficiency doesn’t have an effect on Geekbench a lot in comparison with earlier variations of the app.
Different exams
We additionally ran another exams on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for good measure, although they’re much less necessary due to the reference design system used or the truth that we don’t usually run these on telephones we evaluate.
Nonetheless, a rating of 4,292,032 in AnTuTu may be very spectacular and Qualcomm says it could actually hit 4.5M.
PCMark Work 3.0 Efficiency got here out at a mean of 23,811 and in GFXBench (which we do use, however which is affected by issues like display screen decision), hit 102- and 115fps within the hardest Aztec Excessive check utilizing Open and Vulkan APIs, respectively.
Whereas the numbers are only a reference design, they offer us a good suggestion of how briskly the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 gadgets might be. They embrace the Xiaomi 17 sequence and Samsung Galaxy S26 sequence.
Qualcomm paid for my journey, airfare, and meals to journey to its Snapdragon Know-how Summit. The corporate didn’t ask for or exert management over Tech Advisor’s content material.