Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Battles Apple's A17 Pro In Early Benchmarks
San Diego-based Qualcomm revealed the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 promising a significant jump in speed, efficiency, and a heavier focus on AI. Of course, we like concrete facts to back up those claims. Sparrow News recently dropped a video showing some preliminary AnTuTu, Geekbench, 3DMark, GFXBench, PCMark, and other benchmark comparisons between a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 reference device versus contemporary flagships.
Starting with Geekbench 6, the multi-core test showed that the reference device scoring 7,501 versus an iPhone 15 Pro Max that uses Apple's A17 Pro SoC, which scored 7,237. That's quite the massive leap from what the (highest-ranked Android phone) Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra mustered; it ran 5,077 for the same test.
The A17 Pro regained ground in the single-core section, netting 2,926 versus 2,300 for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. One of the biggest wins for Qualcomm is the AnTuTu score of 2,139,281—significantly higher than Apple's 1,487,203.
Besides the benchmark scores, it's also important to note that the Snapdragon SoC is still built on a 4nm architecture, while the A17 Pro is built on a more efficient 3nm process. Nonetheless, this Qualcomm SoC is comprised of some impressive specs that brings up to 30-percent more power over Gen 2, thanks to the main Cortex-X4 core, five performance Cortex-A720 cores, and two efficiency Cortex-A520 cores.
Can we finally conclude that Qualcomm is on the same playing field as Apple? Only real-world use will tell. Speaking of daily use, we're also excited to see what sort of AI smarts the Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) in the Gen 3 with photo and camera processing, to name a few.
