The Snapdragon 8 Elite represents a new hope in mobile – it’s the first chipset in a long time to have custom CPU cores (and not from Apple). The GPU is also all custom made and also a new generation. And Qualcomm found a way to boost its clock speed by a significant margin than any other smartphone chipset. It all looks great on paper, let’s see if expectations meet reality.
Here we will focus on how the 8 Elite compares to the two previous generations of Snapdragon 8 series. We’re working on a separate post that will pit the Elite against its main rival, the Dimensity 9400.
For this test we use the Realme GT7 Pro
We will use the Realme GT7 Pro for our first round of testing for the Snapdragon 8 Elite. And as mentioned above, we picked some Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 8 Gen 2 phones for comparison. Some of these are gaming phones, so they should represent the best possible performance of the older chipsets. To that end, we should mention that we put the phone in GT mode (i.e. high performance mode) for these tests.
Let’s look at the CPU first, because that’s the biggest change of this generation. It uses Oryon cores, two versions of them: two Prime cores and six Performance cores. These are not Cortex cores as in MediaTek and Samsung chipsets, but an in-house design from Qualcomm. Note that these are not the same Oryon cores we saw in the Snapdragon X Elite in laptops, but instead a second generation.
2x 4.32GHz Oryon prime cores + 6x Oryon performance cores
The two Prime cores run at up to 4.32 GHz, which is insane speed for a pocket-sized device. Apple’s A18 Pro broke the 4GHz barrier earlier this year, but only just: it runs at up to 4.05GHz. The Cortex-X925 of the Dimensity 9400 remains below 4GHz and operates at 3.63GHz. Outside of laptops, the highest clock speed you’ll find on a mobile device is the Apple M4 in the iPad Pro (2024) tablets at 4.4 GHz. But keep in mind that these are 11-inch and 13-inch tablets and they are much easier to keep cool.
Looking at Geekbench 6, the phones group themselves neatly into generations. The 8 Elite represents a massive 31% boost in multi-core performance over the best 8 Gen 3 results – and that comes from gaming phones in maximum effort mode and the overclocked ‘for Galaxy’ chip in the S24 Ultra.
Moving on to the single core test, this is where the high frequency of the Oryon Prime cores should shine. And she shines with a blinding 36% lead over the best of the rest. Looking back at another generation, the Oryon records double the score of some 8 Gen 2 phones (Cortex-X3 Prime core) or just a 52% higher score than the best 8 Gen 2 phone in top performance mode.
Let’s look at the graphics next. The Adreno 830 is built on a new architecture using a sliced design with dedicated memory for each slice. The 830 clocked three of these slices at a maximum of 1.1 GHz.
Three GPU slices up to 1.1 GHz, plus dedicated memory
Once again the generation gap is very clear. The 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test (run at 2160p) achieved a score that was 21% higher than the best we’ve seen from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s Adreno 750. Going back to the 8 Gen 2, the difference is but no less than 68%.
The 8 Elite brings the latest version of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. This technology is gaining traction on mobile after first establishing itself on the desktop. The two-year-old 8 Gen 2 GPU only achieves about half the score of the new Elite chip. The difference from the 8 Gen 3 is a more modest 26%, but that’s still an impressive generational improvement.
Finally, AnTuTu attempts to combine CPU, GPU, memory, and other tests into a single score that represents overall performance. When all this is taken into account, there is a lot more variety: a well-equipped 8 Gen 2 phone can come close to a lower-performing 8 Gen 3 phone. But again, the Snapdragon 8 Elite – or rather the Realme GT7 Pro that houses it – leads the older models by some margin (around 25%).
This is not the end of this story, just the first chapter. We still need to conduct more tests, including the all-important sustainable performance test. We also need to run tests while GT mode is disabled (we ran a few and the phone didn’t lose much performance).
We also encountered some issues during testing, but this could be due to teething problems – the full Realme GT7 Pro reveal is scheduled for November 4although the company has already confirmed some details and even provided us with some tests on the assessment unit we have in the office.
