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Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Benchmark: More performance and less consumption thanks to TSMC N4

Jul 6, 2022

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The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is basically what the underlying chip should have been half a year ago. The efficiency is 30 percent higher by switching to TSMC N4. Qualcomm turns this into a chip that is 10 percent faster and 15 percent more economical than the base model.

Table of contents

1 Samsung is said to have yield problems
Performance increases, consumption still decreases
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, 8 Gen 1 and 888 (Plus) in comparison
Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 benchmark
Conclusion

In principle, new expansion stages of an existing chip are nothing new at Qualcomm. Already at the time of the Snapdragon 800 there were further developments like the 801 and 805. The Snapdragon 810 was followed by v2 and v2.1 with a faster GPU and at the time of the Snapdragon 820 there was later the 821 Pro-AB and Pro-AC. All these and later generations like the 855/855+, then the 865/865+ and finally the 888/888+ had one thing in common: the same manufacturing process. Ultimately, only strict binning was used, so that the best chips on the wafer were selected as the plus variant and were allowed to run with a higher CPU and GPU clock.

Samsung is said to have yield problems

The new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which is used in smartphones such as the Asus ROG Phone 6 (Pro) (test) and the recently introduced Xiaomi 12S Ultra, breaks with previous tradition, because Qualcomm is for the Plus model from Samsung 4LPE switched to TSMC with their N4 process. There had already been speculation in the spring that Qualcomm would allegedly switch from Samsung to TSMC and that the South Korean foundry was having yield problems, meaning it could not produce enough chips. Only 35 percent of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 produced are said to have met the specified specifications. The previous year, the 5LPE/5LPP manufacturing processes are said to have also achieved a comparatively poor yield rate of only 50 percent.

Performance goes up, but consumption goes down

The figures presented by Qualcomm impressively show how differently two supposedly equivalent 4 nm manufacturing processes can perform and how well TSMC is currently positioned in manufacturing. With the same performance, the CPU and GPU should each deliver 30 percent better efficiency than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, although nothing has changed in the actual design of the chip. In view of the additional performance of the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, Qualcomm puts the efficiency gain at 15 percent.

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Benchmark: More performance and less consumption thanks to TSMC N4

Samsung is said to have yield problems

Performance goes up, but consumption goes down

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, 8 Gen 1 and 888 (Plus) compared

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in benchmark

Conclusion