Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 powered Honor 100 majorly disappoints in Geekbench debut

MediaTek's upcoming mid-ranger, the Dimensity 8300, made quite the splash by punching well above its weight class in Geekbench's OpenCL benchmark. The recently unveiled Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 can be considered its main competition. It has now shown up on Geekbench, and the results are nothing short of disappointing.

The Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 shows up on the benchmarking platform alongside the upcoming Honor 100 with 16 GB of RAM. It scores 1,139 on Geekbench 6.2's single-core test and 3,375 in multi-core. Digging deeper into the frequency table, one can see the prime Cortex-A715 CPU core oscillating between 2.4 GHz and 2.6 GHz during the test, indicating that there was some throttling at play.

Nevertheless, the score is a bit abysmal and falls short of Qualcomm's marketing claims for the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, which proclaimed that the SoC offered a 15% CPU performance uplift over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1-powered Honor 90 (US$566 on Amazon), which scores in 1,119 single-core and 3,261 in multi-core. Then again, one can attribute that to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 sample running unoptimized software.

All in all, the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 is deceptively named and seems to be a massive downgrade compared to the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, which scores 1,687 and 4,378 on Geekbench 6.2's single and multi-core tests. Even the pre-production Dimensity 8300 manages a respectable score of 1,512 and 4,886.

Another reason for its sub-par showing may have something to do with Qualcomm's choice of foundry. It didn't mention which company's 4 nm node it was fabricated on, and these numbers suggest that it could be Samsung. It could also be why Qualcomm decided to pit it against the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1, another chip manufactured by Samsung.