It seems that Qualcomm and ARM have diverging ideas on what the future looks like for smartphone chipsets. A few days ago, the popular Weibo leakster Digital Chat Station reported that ARM’s new prime CPU core will have higher IPC to make it fast at lower clock speeds, which should be more efficient. Now DCS is saying that Qualcomm is aiming for record high clock speeds for the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2.
The upcoming flagship chip is being tested at frequencies around 5GHz, according to the leakster. An earlier version of the post claimed 5.3GHz for the overclocked version (“for Galaxy”, “Leading Version”, whatever it is called).
However, DCS updated the post to clarify that such peak frequencies are only being tested to validate the design. The final frequency will be decided based on performance and power efficiency.
Still, it is expected to be higher than the original Snapdragon 8 Elite – its prime cores run at 4.32GHz in the regular version and 4.47GHz in the overclocked version. 4.47GHz is the highest clock speed in a mobile device currently – previously, it was 4.40GHz for the 2024 iPad Pros with M4 chips.
Let’s look at what we know about the competition – all unofficial and based on leaks from early test devices, so it may not be entirely accurate.
The Dimensity 9500 ran Geekbench and showed that its prime core (“Travis”) was clocked at 3.23GHz. That’s lower than the Dimensity 9400 and 9400+, which have their Cortex-X925 cores at 3.62GHz and 3.73GHz, respectively.
Dimensity 9500 scorecard from Geekbench (OpenCL)
The Exynos 2500 was announced earlier this week, it has its Cortex-X925 at 3.3GHz. Of course, we should be looking at the Exynos 2600 instead, which will be featured on Galaxy S26 models, but there are no details on that yet.
It’s not all about clock speed, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will have second-generation Oryon cores, which will reportedly have 25% higher performance. The Adreno 840 GPU will have more cache (16MB, up from 12MB) and is supposed to deliver 30% more performance.
Early benchmark results showed a single-core CPU score of over 4,000 and a multi-core score of over 11,000. For comparison, the current Snapdragon 8 Elite does around 3,100 single-core and 9,800 multi-core. Of course, we shouldn’t put too much stock in leaks of early benchmarks.
The good news is we don’t have long to wait – Qualcomm pulled the Snapdragon Summit forward to September 23-25. Last year, the Elite was announced in late October.
Source (in Chinese)