Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Challenges iPhone 15 Pro's Supremacy, Leaked Benchmarks Suggest

Qualcomm’s latest chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, seems to have outperformed the iPhone 15 Pro‘s A17 Pro chipset, based on the most recent benchmark scores. The scores suggest promising advancements in the pursuit of catching up with Apple Inc.’s AAPL silicon.

What Happened: Qualcomm QCOM unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset earlier this week, promising significant performance and AI enhancements for future Android flagships.

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The official benchmark scores point to a considerable boost in power even though independent benchmarking tests were not allowed at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii.

The scores were obtained using a “Qualcomm Reference Design” (QRD) device, which has historically demonstrated performance comparable to commercial devices, according to Notebookcheck.

The QRD, featuring a 6.65-inch AMOLED display, 24GB of RAM, 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage, and a 4,192 mAh battery, operates on Android 14.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset recorded a single-core score of 2,329 and a multi-core score of 7,501 on Geekbench 6.1, noticeably outperforming its predecessor that powers the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Although the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 trailed behind Apple’s A17 Pro in single-core testing, it outpaced it in multi-core testing. In graphics evaluations, the QRD surpassed the iPhone 15 Pro in 3DMark Wild Life tests.

Chipset	Snapdragon 8 Gen 3	Apple A17 Pro
Single-core	2,329	2,890
Multi-core	7,501	7,194
3DMark Wild Life	19,114	15,747
3DMark Wild Life Extreme	5,338	3,623

Why It Matters: Leaked benchmarks in Sept. indicated that the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 Pro chipset had significantly outperformed Samsung’s 2024 flagship, the Galaxy S24. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset from Qualcomm was shown to be 30% less powerful than the A17 Pro.

Later, another benchmark test revealed that Samsung’s latest flagship chipset, the Exynos 2400, was also trailing the A17 Pro chipset in terms of performance. It was speculated that the Exynos 2400 would only be as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset from the previous year.

The new benchmark scores for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, therefore, represent significant progress for Qualcomm. They indicate a narrowing of the performance gap with Apple’s A17 Pro chipset.

The real-world performance of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is yet to be seen, but the tech industry awaits the release of devices featuring the Gen 3 chip for more comprehensive testing.

Image Credits – Shutterstock

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.