How "elite" is Snapdragon 8 Elite? Let's compare it to Apple's A18 Pro

Qualcomm is now borrowing the “Elite” name from its laptop chip for its latest high-end SoC for smartphones, the Snapdragon X Elite. That’s the name of the new mobile chip, launched during the annual Snapdragon Summit this week.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite features the new Oryon CPU and replaces the Kryo CPUs used in previous mobile chipsets. The company also boasts that this second-gen CPU offers desktop-like performance with two prime cores and six performance cores, alongside an X80 5G modem-RF chip, a sliced-architecture Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU.

And it completely overpowers Apple’s A18 Pro in terms of benchmarking, too. Folks over at SmartPrix leaked a benchmark report suggesting that the Snapdragon 8 Elite significantly outperforms the Apple chip in performance tests, scoring over 3 million points on AnTuTu. On the other hand, A18 Pro scores around 1.65 million.

According to the report, the Snapdragon 8 Elite also outperforms in Geekbench and GFXBench tests, showing a leap over previous Snapdragon models (the Gen 3 from last year) and competitors like MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400

Samsung Mobile President TM Roh has also seemingly confirmed during the keynote speech that the upcoming Galaxy S25 series will be powered by the 8 Elite.

While the phone series is expected to launch during Samsung’s Unpacked event in early 2025, Qualcomm has also enlisted the South Korean tech giant among the OEMs to launch phones with the Snapdragon X Elite in the coming weeks. The list also includes Android brands like Asus, Honor, OnePlus, Oppo, and Xiaomi.

“It revolutionizes mobile experiences by offering personalized, multi-modal generative AI directly on the device,” says Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s senior VP.