Qualcomm Says Snapdragon 8 Elite Phone Chip Smokes An Intel Lunar Lake Laptop

Qualcomm just revealed its shiny new mobile processor at the Snapdragon Summit, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the first smartphone chip to feature the company's Oryon CPU architecture, which debuted earlier this year in the Snapdragon X Elite laptop processors. Qualcomm says it rearchitected Oryon to be efficient enough for smartphones, but that process didn't involve leaving any performance on the table. In a demo at the Summit, Qualcomm showed the Snapdragon 8 Elite beating an Intel Lunar Lake chip, while the laptop was running on battery power. And it wasn't even close. 

The machines were compared in the Geekbench 6 CPU test, which is a synthetic benchmark widely used to compare processors. In both single-core and multi-core tests, the Qualcomm-based phone processor runs away with it. The Snapdragon scores 3,209 (single-threaded) and 10,205 (multi-threaded). Meanwhile, the Lunar Lake-powered laptop in Qualcomm's slide managed just 1,370 (ST) and 7,361 (MT). That's a 134% advantage for the mobile chip.

Naturally, there are a few caveats. Firstly, Qualcomm was completely in control of the testing environment. It's using a reference device with its chip most likely cranked to the max. As mentioned, the laptop is also unplugged, which will often sap performance depending on how the system's power profile is configured. That means the Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V CPU probably dropped into a lower power state that it would when using AC power. Qualcomm also didn't mention which machine or specific Lunar Lake chip it tested.

We happen to have some unplugged benchmark numbers from a couple of Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 200V laptops, which you can see in the chart above. In our testing, Lunar Lake laptops eke out a bit more performance than you'd think just looking at Qualcomm's numbers. Every machine's power/performance profile is different, so some laptops shed more performance than others when running on battery power. And there are multiple Lunar Lake configurations in the wild, which will also behave differently when running on AC or battery. So, take these results for what they worth.

We should also note that the Snapdragon 8 Elite has a new cache heirarchy, where the high-power 4.3GHz (max) "prime" cores get to share their own dedicated 12MB L2 cache, while the more power efficient 3.5GHz "performance" cores  have their own 12MB allotment of L2. That means for ST benchmarks like Geekbench, there should be near zero L2 cache contention. Since GB6 is very sensitive to bandwidth on small amounts of data, that's probably a big part of the reason the Snapdragon 8 Elite achieves its 3,200+ ST score.

Even with those advantages, it's impressive that a chip designed for smartphones is punching in the same class as Lunar Lake. Qualcomm's yearly updates weren't quite as large over the Snapdragon 8 GenX era, but Oryon looks like it could really shake things up.