Ahead of its expected unveiling on November 30, Qualcomm's upcoming premium mobile processor, the rumored Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, has seemingly popped up on benchmarking platform AnTuTu. The development comes barely days after Qualcomm announced plans to scrap the current naming convention for its mobile SoCs in favor of an entirely new naming scheme. According to the company, the new names will include "a single-digit series and generation number," starting with the 8-series chipsets. This suggests that the next-gen flagship SoC from the company will named Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, although the company is yet to officially confirm it as such.
The new Snapdragon SoC is expected to power a range of flagship smartphones next year, including U.S.-spec variants of the Galaxy S22-series from Samsung. The Snapdragon 888 powers the Galaxy S21, while earlier generations of Qualcomm's premier mobile chipsets have regularly found their pride of place in flagship Samsung smartphones This suggests that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 will also find its way to the Galaxy S22 next year. Of course, the Snapdragon-powered versions of Galaxy S-series devices are typically reserved for the U.S. market, while Europe and most other regions get the Exynos-powered variants.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 (a.k.a. the Snapdragon 898) has seemingly notched up an impressive total score of 1,035,020 points on the AnTuTu benchmarking index, making it only the second mobile SoC to hit the coveted 1 million mark. The MediaTek Dimensity 9000 also crossed the 1 million mark and racked up a total of 1,007,396 points, which is just a shade lower than that of the Qualcomm chipset, suggesting that these processors can be fairly competitive against one other. The leak was originally posted on Weibo by 8 o'Clock Tech before being shared on Twitter by Abhishek Yadav.
Much Faster Than The Snapdragon 888+
It is worth noting that while the total scores of the two chipsets have been leaked, the individual component scores are not available yet. However, if the scores do hold up, it will make the new SoC significantly faster than its immediate predecessors, the Snapdragon 888 and 888+. Devices powered by the Snapdragon 888+ only score around 800,000, which makes the next-gen processor almost 25% faster. Either way, the new AnTuTu scores come from unverified leaks that are yet to be corroborated by any reliable sources, so it's best to take them with a pinch of salt.
According to earlier rumors, the next-gen Snapdragon chipset will be based on the 4nm fabrication process and will include Kryo 780 cores based on ARM’s Cortex v9 architecture. It is also expected to introduce the Adreno 730 GPU and the Spectra 680 image signal processor (ISP). While Qualcomm is yet to verify any of the aforementioned rumors, that will likely change in a few days when the company finally makes its next-gen flagship mobile processor official.
Source: 8 o'Clock Tech (via Weibo), Abhishek Yadav (via Twitter)