Qualcomm’s next flagship mobile chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2, has just made an early appearance on Geekbench, more than a month before its official launch.
The listing comes from a Samsung device bearing the model code SM-S947U, believed to be the upcoming Galaxy S26 Edge. This means the chip doing the benchmark run could actually be the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 “for Galaxy” variant.
In Geekbench 6.4, the silicon manages to achieve a single-core score of 3,393 and a multi-core score of 11,515. That’s roughly a 9% boost in single-core performance compared to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, which scores around 3,125 and 9,932 in the same tests.
It’s a healthy bump, but not quite the leap some early leaks hinted at. That may be because the chip in this test wasn’t running flat out.
As you can see below, the tested unit’s prime CPU core caps at just 4.0GHz, well below its maximum potential of 4.74GHz (shown above). In other words, there’s still plenty of performance left untapped, which is common for pre-release hardware.
Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 outperforms Exynos 2600 at partial power
The benchmark listing also confirms that Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will keep a familiar 6+2 CPU core layout. The six efficiency cores will have a clock speed of 3.63GHz. It also supports the new SME (Scalable Matrix Extensions) instruction set, which could help in AI and machine learning workloads.
The Galaxy S26 Edge prototype in this test packs 12GB of RAM and is running Android 16, likely with an early build of Samsung’s One UI 8.0.
While we don’t yet have figures to compare the 8 Elite 2 directly against its true rival, the Dimensity 9500, it clearly outperforms the Exynos 2600 by a significant margin. That too, without running at full power. The Exynos 2600’s Geekbench scores are 2,155 for single-core and 7,788 for multi-core.
The official reveal of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 will take place during the Snapdragon Summit event on September 23.
(Source)
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