Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 shows up in Geekbench with a score of 3,831 — upcoming chip catches to Apple's just-launched A19 Pro, beats desktop chips on single-core perf

If that figure is reflective of shipping products, that would be quite the leap for Qualcomm's chips. The company's SoCs have historically trailed Apple's designs by some margin in both performance and efficiency, so catching up would be quite the feat. The A19 Pro rings in at close to 3,900 points in Geekbench. To put this into perspective, even the mighty Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D post scores of about 3,400 and 3,500, respectively. That's by no means an ultimate measure of real-world performance, but it does display the might of contemporary Arm-based chips, at least in power-constrained scenarios.

The 3,831-point figure for the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 might sound a little too good to be true — particularly as it would mean a generational uplift of over 34% — but it is at least consistent with leaks that showed a purported Samsung handset displaying a score of nearly 3,400 at only a 4 GHz boost clock speed. Per Qualcomm's recent announcement, the chip uses two performance cores and six efficiency cores, with the performance cores hitting 4.61 GHz in the standard configuration, or 4.74 GHz in a Samsung Galaxy-specific flavor. This makes 3,831 points at least plausible, as the recent score post shows 4.6 GHz for the performance cores. The new SoC is manufactured in TSMC's 3-nm N3P node, an evolution of the previous N3E.

That's not the only noteworthy difference, though. Longhorn points out in their X post that "SVE2 and SME say hello", implying that the new chip ought to support the newer versions of Arm's Scalable Vector Instructions and Scalable Matrix Instructions. Both of these CPU instruction sets are called "SIMD" (Single Instruction Multiple Operation), making it easy for developers to efficiently process chunks of data at a time with few instructions.

That means that applications that can make use of those instructions should see quite a significant speed boost. The original SVE was designed for AI-related data processing, but Arm says that SVE2 should cover more broad uses cases, and calls out general-purpose software, multimedia, computer vision, and in-memory databases. Geekbench does use SME (which in turn apparently needs a subset of SVE2), so the posted scores should reflect the use of these optimizations.

By the way, if the "Gen 5" name in this report is throwing you off, know that you're not alone. Many people thought the new Snapdragon 8 Elite SoC would be called "Gen 2", but Qualcomm has decided that the "Gen" suffix now applies to its series of Snapdragon products, making this chip the fifth generation, across Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, with the original Snapdragon 8 Elite counting as "Gen 4".

Of course, consider that these recently-posted figures originate from leakers around the globe and may not reflect production silicon, clock-speed targets, or power envelopes of their final devices. Second, although Geekbench single-core results mostly track with general application performance, that may not be true of every scenario. Regardless, even if figures for production Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices are somewhat lower, that would still be an impressive showing.