Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 earlier this year, promising a 20% increase in CPU and a 23% increase in GPU performance over the previous Elite. Then came the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5, but, confusingly, Qualcomm compared it to the two-year-old Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. So, what are the differences between the Elite and non-Elite Gen 5 chips? The CPU runs at different clock speeds – 2x 3.8GHz + 6x 3.32GHz for the vanilla chip and 2x 4.61GHz + 6x 3.63GHz for the Elite.
The GPUs on both chips are listed as “Adreno 840”, but they are clearly not the same. And the comparison with the old 8 Gen 3 doesn’t help, so we have to turn to Geekbench.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 vs. the old 8 Gen 3
Several phones, e.g. the Moto X70 Ultra, have run Geekbench. This includes running the OpenCL test, which reveals that the GPU runs at 384MHz.
Now, if we turn to a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 based phone like the Realme GT 8 Pro that we benchmarked a while back, we can see that both 384MHz and 768MHz are listed. The latter is the boost frequency, which is what’s missing from the non-Elite chip (the value for reading #53 is the same 384MHz as value #48, the base frequency).
Geekbench OpenCL test: Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (Moto X70 Ultra) • Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (Realme GT 8 Pro)
Qualcomm would never officially say it, but it looks like the vanilla Gen 5 chips are the ones that didn’t pass the frequency tests that would have qualified them as Elite chips. Also, the non-Elite Adreno 840 lacks the High-Performance Memory, which is 18MB of dedicated memory that helps increase bandwidth and decrease latency. The internal identifier for the Elite Adreno 840 is “Adreno 829”, while the non-Elite Adreno 840 is listed as just “Adreno 840.”
Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 highlights
Besides the Motorola, the OnePlus Ace 6T is another upcoming phone with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5. There are others too (Qualcomm mentions iQOO, Honor, Meizu and vivo), so soon we will find out what the differences between Elite and non-Elite Gen 5 chips are in practice.
Source | Via
