Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 samples have very low performance in ST, outperform Apple M2 in MT

Company Qualcomm is preparing its answer to the successful Apple M1 and M2 processors. A new processor is on the way Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4, which should increase from today’s 8 to 12 cores. This should help it significantly in multi-threaded performance. It is expected to support LPDDR5x memory and up to 64 GB of RAM, there is supposed to be an Adreno 740 GPU. While in the past there was a sample with a frequency of 3.4 GHz for powerful cores and 2.5 GHz for economical ones, data from another sample suggests something lower frequency of 3.0 GHz, or 2.3 GHz. And it’s definitely not good for performance.

To give an idea, the Apple M2 in the MacBook Air has a single-threaded performance of around 1900 points in the Geekbench 5 benchmark, Qualcomm would like to reach 1800 points with its Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4. However, the above-mentioned sample only hovered around 1300 points, which is really not much. However, it looks quite different in the multi-threaded test. The Apple M2 is only an 8-core processor (4P+4E), while the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 has 12 cores. Thanks to this, it reached about 10,000 points with multi-threaded performance in the same benchmark, while the Apple M2 only reaches about 8,800. On the other hand, with such a high difference in the number of cores (+ 50%), the roughly 13% difference in performance is quite small.

As for the GPU, this sample was clocked at 1.0 GHz and reached about 5000 points in 3DMark Wild Life Extreme (the GPU in the M2 here reaches about 6900 points). At the same time, the leaker pointed out that there are more variants of the upcoming processor.