Qualcomm previously detailed the specifications of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, stating that the newest chipset's custom performance cores could reach a clock speed of 4.32GHz. The company made no mention that these in-house Oryon could run beyond their default frequencies, but it appears that it is a possibility. The San Diego firm demonstrated this in a new Geekbench 6 benchmarking run, with its single-core results now matching the A18 Pro. As for the multi-core results, they are even higher than before, as the silicon's Oryon cores now run at 4.57GHz.
Earlier, a reference design of the Snapdragon 8 Elite was tested at its default clock speeds of 4.32GHz, and while its single-core results continued to trail behind Apple's A18 Pro, it achieved the highest multi-core score for a smartphone with 10,617 points, beating other competing Android SoCs by up to 47 percent. The latest feat was shown by Nicolas La Rocco, showing that the two performance cores belonging to the Snapdragon 8 Elite were operating at 4.57GHz, while the six efficiency ones remained at 3.53GHz.
When running Geekbench 6, the Snapdragon 8 Elite with the overclocked performance cores achieves unprecedented results, attaining a single-core score of 3,407, with the multi-core figure even higher at 10,875. When we compared the single-core results with the A18 Pro on Geekbench 6's database, we found that the Snapdragon 8 Elite beat the A18 Pro powering various iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max while losing to others. In short, it is incredible what Qualcomm has accomplished with the latest chipset, but it comes at a steep cost.
Previously, when comparing the efficiency levels of the Snapdragon 8 Elite and A18 Pro, Apple's latest 3nm SoC consumed slightly less power while delivering a higher single-core in Geekbench 6, delivering the best 'performance per watt' results of any smartphone silicon, at least in one particular test. With the Snapdragon 8 Elite's cores running at 4.57GHz, the power draw would be much higher while producing diminished results, spiking the thermals. We doubt these clock speeds can be sustained when running prolonged workloads, but we are interested to see what performance limits can be crossed with Qualcomm's latest and greatest.