Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 Blows Past Apple's A16 Bionic In Benchmark Leak

snapdragon hero
We've only just gotten the first phones with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip, including the new OnePlus 11, and already an alleged benchmark of its successor has leaked. The supposed Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 benchmark shows the ARM processor besting everything under the sun, even Apple's class-leading A16 Bionic.

The benchmark comes by way of a Weibo account, so take this with a grain of salt. However, the screenshot of Geekbench results shows an impressive result of 1,930 single-core and 6,236 multi-core. The post further claims power consumption has decreased by 20% versus the Gen 2 despite the higher performance.

That's a substantial increase over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 reference hardware, which we tested at 1,486/5,225. The latest iPhones put up numbers around 1,850 for single-core and 5,350 in multi-core. So, based on the leaked numbers, the iPhone falls just slightly behind in single-core, but it's down around 15% in multi-core performance in Geekbench.

Snapdragon leak

Geekbench can provide an interesting point of comparison, but you can't extrapolate the benchmark to final device performance. Apple optimizes its software for just a few hardware profiles, so it doesn't need the same resources as Android on Snapdragon. That said, this sort of year-over-year performance gain would be impressive and would likely translate to more responsive devices.

Other leaks based on the Qualcomm engineering hardware claim the Gen 3 chip uses a 3nm process node, which would be an improvement over the 4nm process currently in use. Other sources disagree about whether the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will have eight or ten CPU cores. That could mean a prime core, five high-power CPU cores, and either two or four low-power cores.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will continue appearing in flagship smartphones throughout 2023. We don't expect to get any official specifics about the next-gen chip until late in 2023.
Ryan Whitwam

Ryan Whitwam

Ryan is a writer, editor, and lover of all things electronic. He's been covering technology and science for almost 15 years at sites like Android Police, ExtremeTech, The Wirecutter, and more. He has probably reviewed more smartphones than most people will own in their entire lives. Follow him on Twitter