Qualcomm is expected to officially launch the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in October this year. Before sending the commercial units to their smartphone manufacturer partners, comprehensive testing and benchmarking of this flagship product's engineering samples are necessary to address any issues. However, early results indicate disappointing performance of the chipset, with the operating performance of the performance cores reportedly significantly lower than previously reported.
Earlier reports suggested that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 was being tested with clock speeds of 4.00GHz and above, with the design rumored to be finalized by April. This implies that the SoC will achieve higher single-core scores. With the mentioned frequencies and the "2+6" CPU cluster, multi-threaded performance is expected to see a significant boost. Unfortunately, as shown in benchmark test videos posted by @negativeonehero on the Chinese website Bilibili, these attributes were not reflected.
From the images, it is evident that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor's clock speed never exceeded 2.40GHz, achieving only 1.85 million points in the AnTuTu test. These lackluster results may be attributed to thermal throttling, a common occurrence in engineering samples. However, early Geekbench 6 leaks indicate that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 not only outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 by 46% in multi-core performance but also easily surpasses Apple's A17 Pro and competes with the M3.
In addition, in the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark, the rumored Adreno 830 GPU is said to be faster than Apple's M2. However, before we express disappointment over the lackluster results, a user named @TangS63121 claims that these specifications and other details come from an engineering sample of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and the images appear to have been altered.
This means that we must approach the scores of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 with caution, and we will also closely monitor more similar benchmark test results to gather further information.
