Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset provides somewhat better benchmark performance than its predecessor, the Snapdragon 888, but Qualcomm is still behind the most recent iPhones on sheer power, according to benchmarks.
Those benchmarks, run on a Qualcomm reference device at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, show a chipset that's a primarily incremental step up from the existing Snapdragon 888. That's surprising, considering Qualcomm promised 20% faster CPU capabilities and 30% better GPU in its presentations this week.
The reference phone has a 1080p, 144Hz display, 8GB of LPDDR5 RAM, and 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage. It's running the 8 Gen 1, which has a 3GHz Cortex-X2 prime core; three 2.5GHz Cortex-A710 cores; and four Cortex-A510 1.8GHz cores, along with 6MB of L3 cache.
That's a big step up from the Snapdragon 888, which uses the previous Cortex-X1, Cortex-A78, and Cortex-A55 core designs. But on the benchmarks ... eh.
I compared the Snapdragon reference device to Apple iPhone 12 and 13 models, as well as Qualcomm's Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders, running an 888 at maximum performance, and the popular Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.
On the Geekbench multicore scores, a measure of CPU power, I saw a 15% bump over the Galaxy S21 Ultra, and an overall score competitive with the iPhone 12, not the iPhone 13.
Qualcomm has acknowledged it's behind on CPU power. The company recently acquired a startup called Nuvia, formed by former Apple engineers, and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that the first Nuvia-based chips would sample to customers in late 2022.
On Basemark Web, a browser-based benchmark, the reference phone showed better results than previous Qualcomm phones but nowhere near the performance of the iPhone 13.
GFXBench, a GPU benchmark, showed a different story when using the newer Vulkan APIs, with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's new Adreno GPU scoring higher on the key offscreen test than any other Apple- or Qualcomm-based phone. Qualcomm hasn't released any details about the design of the new Adreno, although it did say it was optimized for Vulkan and would show up to a 60% improvement over last year's models when using that API.
Qualcomm has tried to focus on applications rather than raw performance with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, and it's clear why. On the most basic, PC-type measures of system performance, Qualcomm is currently seriously lagging its competitors at Apple.
That doesn't mean the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will be bad. I saw last week how it enables new applications based on things like its modem, AI, and camera systems. It does show Qualcomm's tough position in basic computing right now, though, and its relatively weak position trying to counter Apple's M1 chips in a PC transition to ARM.
The reference device was also buggy and un-optimized (the Android multitasking button frequently didn't work, and Basemark Web crashed several times.) Hopefully, we'll see better performance from finished products like the Samsung Galaxy S22 and OnePlus 10.