Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Benchmarks Show New Chip Beats iPhone 15 Pro Max in Geekbench Multi-Core Test

Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was launched by Qualcomm earlier this week as the company's newest flagship mobile processor. We can expect the new chipset to feature on flagship smartphones that will debut in the coming weeks and months — starting with the Xiaomi 14 that will be launched in China on Thursday. According to Qualcomm, the new octa-core chip will offer a 30 percent increase in performance and a 20 percent improvement in power efficiency over its predecessor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. Now, benchmarks of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 have been published by the chipmaker, giving us an idea of how it fares against existing smartphones.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is an octa-core mobile processor comprising an Arm Cortex-X4 Prime core at a peak clock speed of 3.3GHz, three Cortex-A720 performance cores at 3.2GHz and two Cortex-A720 cores at 3GHz, along with two Cortex-A520 efficiency cores at 2.3GHz. It is a 4nm processor, unlike Apple's latest A17 Bionic chip that is fabricated using TSMC's 3nm process technology.

The chipmaker revealed on Thursday that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scores between 2,320 and 2,229 points on the Geekbench 6 single-core benchmark test. This figure is higher than the score of nearly every other Android smartphone currently available, including the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, OnePlus 11, and Google Pixel 8 Pro. However, Qualcomm's new chip lags behind the iPhone 15 Plus and iPhone 15 Pro Max, that score around 2,600 and 2,900 points, respectively.

However, in the multi-core Geekbench 6 benchmark test, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scores between 7,439 and 7,526 points. This places the new smartphone chip ahead of the iPhone 15 Pro Max, which has lower scores (around 7,200 points) and iPhone 15 Plus (around 6,400 points). Other handsets powered by last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip score have even lower multi-core benchmark scores, well under the 6,000-point mark.

In the AnTuTu benchmark test, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored between 2.13 million and 2.14 million points — this score is higher than every single smartphone released by smartphone makers with the Snapdragon Gen 2 chipset — including the iQoo 11 (16 million points), Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (15.2 million points), Xiaomi 13 Pro (15.3 million points), and OnePlus 11 (15 million points).

It is worth noting that these benchmark scores are from Qualcomm's reference device, a smartphone that is powered by the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip paired with 24GB LPDDR5x RAM at 4.8GHz and 512GB of UFS 4 storage. The reference device has a 6.65-inch full-HD (1,080x2,340 pixels) AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate and packs a 4,192mAh battery. We should can expect to see more benchmarks from handsets running the new chip in the coming weeks and months, starting with the Xiaomi 14 that will be launched in China on Thursday.