Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced its latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile chip and platform, promising to “revolutionize flagship smartphones” with “innovative” experiences. The new chip is expected to launch in flagship Android smartphones later this year, but benchmarks suggest it can’t compete with Apple’s A16 Bionic chip, which powers the iPhone 14 Pro models.
While the latest chip won’t officially ship to smartphones for a few months, Geekbench scores for the chip have already been spotted in an unreleased Android phone. According to the results (via DealNTech), the latest Snapdragon 8 chip scored 1483 in single-core and 4709 in multi-core. The A16 Bionic scored 1874 in single-core and 5372 in multi-core. In comparison, the A15 Bionic chip, found in the lower-end iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 models, also scored higher than Qualcomm’s latest chip with 1709 on a single core compared to 1483.
In a press release for the new chip, Qualcomm said it will “define a new standard for connected computing, intelligently designed with innovative AI at every level to enable extraordinary experiences.” Qualcomm’s senior vice president and general manager of mobile phones, Chris Patrick, said, “Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will revolutionize the flagship smartphone landscape in 2023.”
Compared to the first-generation Snapdragon 8 chip, Qualcomm says the newest platform offers a 35 percent increase in CPU performance, a 25 percent increase in GPU performance, and increased power efficiency. In 2020, Apple’s A14 Bionic and even last year’s A13 Bionic chip outperformed Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 chip that was released in Android devices last year.
Performance claims made by Apple during the iPhone 14 Pro unveiling in September
The A16 Bionic chip in the iPhone 14 Pro, like the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, is based on TSMC’s 4nm process, and both offer improved performance and power efficiency. The A16 Bionic chip includes 16 billion transistors, a 6-core CPU, a 5-core GPU and a 16-core neural engine. “The competition is still working to catch up to the performance of the A13, which we first introduced with the iPhone 11 three years ago,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. during the Apple event in September.