Benchmarking the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2: Here’s what you should know

Benchmark tests performed on a reference design running the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 demonstrate improvements over the chip from a year ago and even the Apple A16 Bionic CPU.

Although it might not accurately represent the outcomes we observe in retail items, Qualcomm’s reference device is meant to demonstrate the chip’s practical potential. For instance, when compared to Qualcomm’s reference unit from the previous year, retail Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 phones performed noticeably worse. Treat this as a ballpark estimate rather than a definitive reference because partners may decide to make additional performance or power usage enhancements as they see fit. Second, Qualcomm’s reference phone has 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM, which is a relatively standard configuration for a flagship device.

We left Qualcomm’s “UI Perf Mode” option enabled since it was already turned on by default. Please keep this in mind as you review these results because it effectively tries to compel the benchmarking apps to operate on Prime cores in order to scrape out a tiny bit higher score in some benchmarks.

Based on its own testing, Qualcomm furnished us with a set of anticipated benchmark results. We simply used this as a guide, and a table with the benchmark results Qualcomm anticipated for the reference device is included at the bottom of this article.