First benchmarks: This is how fast the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is

The central processor unit of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is manufactured in a more modern manufacturing process and is based on the current Cortex designs from ARM. Qualcomm divides the central processing unit into three clusters, but each cluster hardly offers improved clock speeds compared to the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 888+.

While the prime core works unchanged at 3.0 GHz compared to the Snapdragon 888+, the frequencies of the three performance cores (Cortex A710) have been increased slightly to 2.5 GHz. By contrast, the equivalent cores in the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 888+ work at 2.42 GHz. The four energy-saving cores (Cortex A510) work again at up to 1.8 GHz each.

Correspondingly, the performance increase in Geekbench is low. Single-core performance increases by around 10 per cent, but it does not come close to the iPhone 13 Pro with Apple's A15 Bionic SoC. In Geekbench's multi-core test, the increase was even slightly lower compared to the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 888+.

The situation is different in the AnTuTu 9, which also only achieves an improvement of 10 per cent in the CPU benchmark. However, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is 7 per cent faster than the iPhone 13 Pro in this benchmark.

The new Adreno 730 GPU shows itself to be extremely strong, demonstrating enormous improvements when interacting with the Vulkan API, in particular. In the current 3DMark Wild Life (Extreme), the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 achieves 77 per cent or 68 per cent higher scores than its predecessor. Only the iPhone 13 Pro is faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in this benchmark, but it also uses the in-house metal interface. If we use the older OpenGL ES, Apple's chipset can no longer keep up, putting the Snapdragon 8 clearly out on top. Switching to this API demonstrates relatively small increases in the total score. It is a different story again when assessing a pure graphic calculation though, where the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 enjoys at least a 50 per cent lead over its rivals.

The Adreno 730 in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is dominant in GFXBench too, in which it even outperforms Apple's A15 Bionic in every test. Similarly, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 offers almost double its performance compared to its predecessor SoC. Using the Vulkan API, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC can still achieve a few more frames than its competitors. This is an excellent thing in itself, but Qualcomm claims that 95 per cent of all games still utilise the OpenGL ES API.

Since the system speed does not only depend on the SoC, the values in PCMark indeed leave a lot of room. However, they are already relatively high in Android 12, installed on the reference design. It is also worth mentioning that the AnTuTu score reaches seven digits for the first time.

The AImark only covers a particular part of the performance for machine learning and AI algorithms. Here, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 lags behind its predecessor and must admit defeat to Apple and Samsung's Exynos 2100.

We would not recommend overestimating these scores though, because AImark is yet to be optimised for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. We expect to see significantly higher scores when the first final devices arrive. 

The memory connection has been improved, especially in terms of write speeds. Additionally, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 delivers significant improvements when writing small data blocks compared to the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 888+.

High performance usually creates a lot of heat, a problem that many manufacturers have not gotten to grips with the Snapdragon 888 and Snapdragon 888+. Even the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 reference design is not immune to this, as our 3DMark Wild Life Unlimited stress test results below demonstrate.

The new Snapdragon SoC reaches its lowest point by its seventh run, losing around a quarter of its initial performance. Still, it remains around 50 per cent faster than its predecessor with good cooling. Incidentally, the Apple A15 Bionic drops to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's level from the fourteenth run, where the pair remain locked until they complete the test.

Therefore, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's long-term performance is equivalent to that of Apple. In saying that, the A15 Bionic only proves to be stronger in terms of peak performance.