The flagship chipsets for 2025 have arrived: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite and MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400. While most phones running on these chips will see the light of day by 2025, we have two phones using the most powerful SoCs: the Realme GT7 Pro with the Snapdragon 8 Elite and the vivo X200 Pro with the Dimensity 9400.
Historically, Qualcomm’s chips have outperformed MediaTek’s, but lately the Taiwanese company has been catching up. The latest Dimensity runs on an octa-core CPU with 1x 3.63 GHz Cortex-X925 & 3x 3.3 GHz Cortex-X4 & 4x 2.4 GHz Cortex-A720 cores and uses an Immortalis-G925 GPU.
The Snapdragon 8 Elite, on the other hand, features internally designed Oryon cores – 2x 4.20 GHz Oryon V2 Phoenix L + 6x 3.53 GHz Oryon V2 Phoenix M. These are significantly different CPU clusters compared to the Dimensity and are clocked higher, too . The Adreno 830 GPU is also receiving some attention and promises a big leap compared to the previous generation.
But how do these two chips compare in terms of performance? Here are the benchmarks
As expected, the Snapdragon 8 Elite shows better CPU performance in both single-core and multi-core workloads. In Geekbench 6, the SD8 Elite outperforms the Dimensity 9400 by 10% in the multi-core scenario and by 15% in the single-threaded scenario.
However, on combined workloads like AnTuTu 10, the Dimensity 9400 is 6% lower than Qualcomm’s silicon. we should point out that for all practical purposes, these kinds of performance differences make little difference.
In the GPU-heavy 3DMark benchmarks, the Dimensity 9400 outperforms the SD8 Elite by 7-8% depending on the benchmark, in this case the Wild Life Extreme and Solar Bay.
It’s quite a surprise to see the Immortalis GPU beating the Adreno, even by a small margin.
Keep in mind that these are results from pre-market units, so once we get more phones using these SoCs, we could see a change in the rankings. Still, we doubt we’ll see drastic differences.
Either way, we see this as an absolute win, as users can now rest assured that if they opt for a smartphone with Dimensity 9400, they won’t be sacrificing raw performance. Both chipsets are powerful enough to handle anything you throw at them.