After Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 today, we had the chance to sit through a benchmarking session with the latest chip — specifically the ‘Extreme’ version. This is where Qualcomm allows us to benchmark its newest chip in what is called a ‘reference design’ device. It’s a phone, but the only specs that are truly maxed out are the chip and RAM. To be honest, these devices must have cost a fortune this year.
Here are the specs for the reference device this time around:
- 6.73″ WQHD 120Hz AMOLED display
- Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6
- 24GB LPDDR5X 5.4GHz RAM
- 1TB UFS 5.0 storage
- 4,400mAh battery
During the short time we had with the device — about an hour — we were able to run Geekbench 6, Geekbench 7, and AnTuTu, and we’re seeing some pretty nice gains year-over-year.
Qualcomm’s 80+% gains year-over-year are real
During today’s keynote, Qualcomm stated that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 delivers 85% better performance while consuming 20% less power than last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. A big part of this is because Qualcomm has moved to a 2nm process for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 this year. We also saw huge gains for the A20 Pro that’s in the new iPhone.
Let’s start off with AnTuTu; here’s the score for the two QRD devices, year-over-year:
- Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 QRD: 5,522,833
- Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 QRD: 4,084,711
Now, this is only about a 65% improvement year-over-year, but it’s important to remember that AnTuTu scores much more than just the CPU; it also scores the UX as well as RAM and a few other components. The real differences we saw were with the Geekbench 6 scores.
| Device | Geekbench 6 – Single-Core | Geekbench 6 – Multi-Core | Geekbench 6 – GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 QRD | 4,329 | 12,748 | 29,021 |
| Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 QRD | 3,739 | 12,101 | 23,721 |
| Snapdragon 8 Elite QRD | 3,220 | 10,415 | 17,867 |
We even threw in the Snapdragon 8 Elite from two years ago to see how much things have changed in just two years. So year-over-year, we’re looking at an 82% improvement in single-core, only 6% in multi-core, and about 22% in GPU testing here. Not much to write home about in multi-core and GPU, but single-core is a huge improvement this year.
Of course, since Geekbench 7 is now out, we had to run that benchmark. Unfortunately, we don’t have last year’s scores to compare against, since they weren’t available then. However, we do have scores from the iPhone 18 Pro and its A20 Pro to compare — also a 2nm chipset.
| Device | Geekbench 7 – Single-Core | Geekbench 7 – Multi-Core | Geekbench 7 – GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 QRD | 3,454 | 11,723 | 26,107 |
| iPhone 18 Pro – A20 Pro | 3,976 | 11,252 | 62,091 |
So, as we can see here, it is keeping up with the latest from Apple. It’s worth mentioning here that we have seen higher scores on the iPhone 18 Pro Max, though we only have the smaller iPhone 18 Pro in our possession, so that’s what we’re testing here. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 is able to keep up with and surpass the A20 Pro in multi-core performance; of course, a big reason for that is the fact that it has two 5GHz cores and six 4GHz cores, while Apple has six cores, period.
The post We Benchmarked the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, and the Year-Over-Year Gains Are Real appeared first on Android Headlines.
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