Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced its latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip and mobile platform, promising a "flagship phone revolution" with an "unprecedented" experience. The new chip is expected to be introduced in flagship Android phones later this year, but tests suggest it won't be able to compete with the A16 Bionic chip that powers Apple's iPhone 14 Pro models.
While the latest chip won't officially ship to phones for a few months, Geekbench results for the chip have been spotted on a yet-to-be-released Android phone. According to the results (via DealNTech ), the latest Snapdragon 8 chip scored 1,483 in single-core and 4,709 in multi-core. A16 Bionic scored 1874 points in single-core and 5372 points in multi-core. By comparison, the A15 Bionic chip in the iPhone 13 Pro and low-end iPhone 14 also scored higher than Qualcomm's latest chip, scoring 1,709 per core compared to 1,483 per core.
In a press release about the new chip, Qualcomm said it would "set a new standard for connected computing, intelligently designed to deliver unprecedented experiences with innovative artificial intelligence." "Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will revolutionize the mobile market in 2023," said Chris Patrick, senior vice president and vice president of mobile at Qualcomm.
Compared to the first-generation Snapdragon 8 chip, the latest platform offers a 35% increase in CPU performance, a 25% increase in GPU performance and better energy efficiency, according to Qualcomm. In 2020, Apple's A14 Bionic chip and last year's A13 Bionic chip beat out the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 chip introduced in last year's Android devices.
The A16 Bionic chip in the iPhone 14 Pro is based on TSMC's 4nm process, as is the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, both with improved performance and energy efficiency. The A16 Bionic chip has 16 billion transistors, a 6-core CPU, a 5-core GPU, and a 16-core Neural Engine. “The race is still on to match the performance of the A13 that we introduced with iPhone 11 three years ago,” Greg Joswiak, Apple's senior vice president of global marketing, said at an Apple event in September.
