Confirmed: The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 blows the iPhone 17 Pro out the water

Qualcomm’s new flagship smartphone processor is official. At the Snapdragon Summit, we’ve been able to benchmark the chip, confirming that it not only beats Apple’s rival A19 Pro (which powers the iPhone 17 Pro), but thrashes it.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (not Elite 2 as expected) is touted as the ‘fastest mobile CPU in the world’ and that might well be true. We’ve run some benchmarks and they are seriously impressive.

Apple’s top-end iPhones can be difficult to beat in certain tests but just check out the results below. It’s not even close.

It’s worth noting that we’re testing the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 on a reference design phone that will never be launched. However, it does provide a good idea of what phones with the chip will be like.

The reference design is not overclocked in any way and we tested at room temperature in a conference room, with no special lab conditions that might improve results. We run tests many times and average scores to eliminate anomalies.

Relatedly, MediaTek just announced its new flagship Dimensity 9500, but we haven’t been able to benchmark that for comparison.

Geekbench 6

We’re focusing on Geekbench 6 here as it’s the benchmarking app we’ve used the longest at Tech Advisor and also because it isn’t as affected by the other major bits of hardware that make up a phone like the screen.

With scores into the 12,000 range, this is officially the fastest chip we’ve ever tested. It blows the iPhone 17 Pro (which we tested in the same room at the same time) out of the water, as it only reached the 9,000 range.

Compared to the previous generation, it’s an impressive improvement, even with the overclocked 8 Elite inside the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

When we crunched the numbers, we found that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a whopping 30.6% faster than the A19 Pro in the iPhone 17 Pro and 31% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy in the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.

This surpasses Qualcomm’s claim of a 20% CPU improvement.

Single-core figures aren’t so impressive, but they don’t matter half as much. The reference design device Qualcomm provided had a whopping 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, but memory performance doesn’t affect Geekbench much compared to earlier versions of the app.

Other tests

We also ran some other tests on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for good measure, though they’re less important because of the reference design device used or the fact that we don’t typically run these on phones we review.

However, a score of 4,292,032 in AnTuTu is very impressive and Qualcomm says it can hit 4.5M.

PCMark Work 3.0 Performance came out at an average of 23,811 and in GFXBench (which we do use, but which is affected by things like screen resolution), hit 102- and 115fps in the hardest Aztec High test using Open and Vulkan APIs, respectively.

While the numbers are just a reference design, they give us a good idea of how fast the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 devices will be. They include the Xiaomi 17 series and Samsung Galaxy S26 series.

Qualcomm paid for my travel, airfare, and meals to travel to its Snapdragon Technology Summit. The company did not ask for or exert control over Tech Advisor’s content.