We just compared the Snapdragon 8 Elite: the iPhone 16 Pro has been officially announced

It’s tempting to fixate on performance when talking about a new chipset like the Snapdragon 8 Elitewhile there are so many other aspects of the mobile experience that the system-on-chip controls. In the case of Qualcomm‘s new Snapdragon, which covers everything from the photos you can take on Snapdragon 8 Elite devices to the AI experiences powered by the chipset to how long those phones last on a charge.

Still, performance remains a big part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite story – something Qualcomm is happy to talk about. The new chipset uses a version of the Oryon CPU that was first released for connected computers, but has been adapted for mobile, and the results are quite dazzling – especially if you like to compare the performance figures to the iPhone 16 Pro models and the A18 Pro chipset they run on.

When Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite earlier this week, Qualcomm published some of its own benchmarks for the new chip, promising to give the latest iPhones a run for their money. According to Qualcomm, the Oryon CPU in the Snapdragon 8 Elite delivers a 45% boost in both single- and multi-core performance on the Geekbench 6 benchmark compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 – not exactly a slouch in the performance department. The Adreno GPU on the new chipset should see a 40% performance boost.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite powers a reference device — (Image credit: Future)

At this week’s Snapdragon Summit, which I’m attending as a guest of the company, Qualcomm provided a benchmarking session where we were able to verify those numbers using a Qualcomm-supplied reference device with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The 6.8-inch reference device runs the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite configuration, with a CPU that maxes out at 4.32 GHz. The device also came with 24GB of RAM.

Here’s what we discovered when running some common benchmarks with the Snapdragon 8 Elite device.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Performance Tests

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite running speedometer on a reference device

(Image credit: Future)

When Tom’s Guide tests a phone’s overall performance, we look at Geekbench, which measures a processor’s single- and multi-core power when it comes to performing various tasks. Apple’s A-series chips have dominated this test in recent years, although the recent Snapdragon silicon has closed the gap, especially in multi-core performance.

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Device	Geekbench 6 (single/multicore)	Speedometer 3 (Chrome)
Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device	3,212 / 10,318	33.2
Galaxy S24 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3)	2,300 / 7,249	16.3
iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro)	3,400 / 8,391	28.1
iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 Pro)	3,386/8306	27.8

That improvement picks up the pace with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. Our reference device achieved average single- and multi-core scores of 3,212 and 10,318, respectively. That multicore result is particularly revealing, as we haven’t seen a mobile device shoot past 10,000 yet.

As you might imagine, those Snapdragon 8 Elite numbers are big improvements over what the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 produced during the same tests. Our Snapdragon 8 Elite results surpassed the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powered Galaxy S24Ultra with 40% on the single-core test and 42% on multi-core.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite still trails Apple’s A18 Pro chip in single-core results on Geekbench. The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max scored 3,400 and 3,386 respectively, putting them ahead of our Qualcomm reference device. But in the multi-core test, the iPhone 16 Pro achieved a result of 8,391, while the Pro Max achieved 8,306 – both scores are well behind what the Snapdragon 8 Elite managed.

We also ran Speedometer 3 on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, as that test can show how fast browser performance can be on a given chipset. For consistent results we used the speedometer Chrome.

Our Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered unit achieved an average of 33.2 in Speedometer 3, compared to 16.3 for the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The iPhone 16 Pro’s scores were slightly closer: the standard Pro scored 28.1 while the Pro Max scored 27.8.

Snapdragon 8 Elite graphics testing

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite held in hand

(Image credit: Future)

We use 3DMark’s Wild Life test to look at graphics performance, as it’s a good way to compare iOS and Android devices. In this test you are looking for a phone that produces higher frame rates. We ran both the Unlimited version of the Wild Life graphics benchmark and the more demanding Extreme test to gauge how the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s GPU performed.

In recent years, Snapdragon-powered phones have been pulling away from the iPhone in this test. That certainly continued when we ran Wild Life on our Snapdragon 8 Elite test unit.

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Device	Wild life unlimited (fps)	Wild Life Unlimited Extreme (fps)
Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device	150.9	41.7
Galaxy S24 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3)	121.8	29.8
iPhone 16 Pro (A18 Pro)	109.3	23
iPhone 16 Pro Max (A18 Pro)	107.5	22.9

On Wild Life Unlimited, the Snapdragon 8 Elite device produced an average of 150.9 frames per second when running the on-screen test. (There’s an off-screen option that can produce higher frame rates, but we’re using the on-screen numbers for consistent comparisons with phones we’ve tested internally.) That 150.9fps result beat the Galaxy S24 Ultra by 24%.

More importantly, the gap with the iPhone’s performance in this test continues to widen. The iPhone 16 Pro achieved a result of 109.3 fps, while the iPhone 16 Pro Max scored 107.5. Those numbers were already behind the Galaxy S24 Ultra, so you think if the Snapdragon 8 Elite is the Galaxy S25UltraSamsung’s new phone will far outperform the current iPhones in terms of graphics.

When running the Wild Life Unlimited Extreme test, the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s result of 41.7 fps beat the Galaxy S24 Ultra by 39% and the iPhone 16 Pro by 81%.

Snapdragon 8 Elite AI Testing

AI features are now a mainstay of smartphones, and a lot of that depends on the performance of a chipset’s neural engine – especially if you want to run those AI functions on the device itself. Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Elite’s neural engine is 45% faster than its predecessor.

To see what improvements this translates into, we used the AIMark benchmark. That benchmark is based on the ResNet-34, Inception-V3, Mobilenet-SSD and DeepLab-v3+ models for image classification, recognition and segmentation: the higher the score, the better.

Qualcomm is right to say that the neural engine in the Snapdragon 8 Elite is faster than what last year’s chipset had to offer. On AIMark, the 8 Elite’s score of 308,241 surpassed the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s score of 243,765 by 26%. iPhones usually score quite low on AiMark, so a cross-platform comparison would not be the most illustrative here. And there are many more AI benchmarks that can provide a more complete picture of neural performance. However, this AiMark test does show the generational leap between the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.

Snapdragon 8 Elite: What we didn’t test

When we review phones, we like to do a real-world test where we take a video clip and transcode it to 1080p using Adobe Premiere Rush. We time the results, with the better performing phone completing the task faster than its rival. However, due to time and device limitations, we didn’t get the chance to run this transcoding test on the Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered reference device.

Traditionally, this has been a test where Apple’s A-series chips finished well ahead of the Snapdragon-powered devices. Most recently, the iPhone 16 Pro Max completed the task in 21 seconds, compared to 42 seconds for the Galaxy S24 Ultra. We’ll obviously be very interested to see if the Snapdragon 8 Elite can shrink in that time when we get a chance to fully test the first phones with Qualcomm’s latest silicon.

Snapdragon 8 Elite prospects

When we spoke to Qualcomm’s Chris Patrick about the Snapdragon 8 Elitehe described the new silicon as “a desktop-class CPU (with) mobile-level power efficiency.” After running the first benchmarks on the Snapdragon 8 Elite, we can confirm that he is certainly right about the power of the CPU.

We’ll have to run more benchmarks on the devices that are released with a Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, but for now it looks like Qualcomm is on track to grab the mobile performance crown in early 2025. We’ll see how Apple responds later in the year.