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Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 in the benchmark: Qualcomm closes the gap to the flagships

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With the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, Qualcomm recently presented a new smartphone SoC just below the premium series, which seems to correspond to the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 in many areas. The first benchmarks of the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 confirm this impression and catapult the chip ahead of the former flagships of the competition.

Qualcomm advertises the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, among other things, with 50 percent more CPU power and 100 percent more GPU power compared to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. First of all: the editors had not previously had a smartphone available for the corresponding comparison. In a price comparison, the Xiaomi 13 Lite is currently the only smartphone officially available in this country that uses this system-on-a-chip.

First Cortex -X core for Snapdragon 7 series

The new chip generates the performance increase advertised on paper via a prime core based on the Arm Cortex-X2 with up to 2.91 GHz. So far, Qualcomm had chosen one of the four Cortex-A710 for this task with the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 and operated it at 2.4 GHz instead of 2.36 GHz. For the first time, Qualcomm is using Arm's largest CPU core outside of the Snapdragon 8 series. Three performance cores based on the Cortex-A710 with a maximum of 2.49 GHz and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores with up to 1.80 GHz complete the CPU. This setup shows strong parallels to the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, which runs the same number of the same arm cores with higher 3.2 GHz, 2.75 GHz and 2.0 GHz.

  1. Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 at a glance (Image: Qualcomm)

Image 1 of 4

Overview of the new CPU (image: Qualcomm)
Advertised lead over unknown competition (Image: Qualcomm)
Sustained Performance (Image: Qualcomm)

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (test) was an expansion stage of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 last summer, which, in addition to more clock speed for the CPU and GPU, brought an important change, especially on the production side: Instead of Samsung's 4LPX, TSMC's N4 process was used, which is also used by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and now the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2.

CPU performance just behind Snapdragon 8(+) Gen 1

With the upgraded CPU, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 is just behind the Snapdragon 8 and 8+ Gen 1 in the Geekbench single-core measurement, but far ahead of the Snapdragon 778G, 778G+, 888, Samsung Exynos 990 and 2200 and Google Tensor G2. The multi-core measurement certifies that the chip has practically the same performance as a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 within the scope of the measurement deviation. ComputerBase carried out the measurements as part of the MWC 2023 on a Qualcomm Reference Design (QRD) with 12 GB LPDDR5 and 256 GB UFS 3.1 and benchmarks preinstalled by the manufacturer.

Geekbench 5.1

Geekbench 5.1 – Single-Core Total

Unit: points Geekbench 5.1 – Single-Core Crypto

Unit: Points Geekbench 5.1 – Single-Core Integer

Unit: Points Geekbench 5.1 – Single-Core Floating Point

Unit: Score Geekbench 5.1 – Multi-Core Total

Unit: Points Geekbench 5.1 – Multi-Core Crypto

Unit: Points Geekbench 5.1 – Multi-Core Integer

Unit: Points Geekbench 5.1 – Multi-Core Floating Point

Unit: Score Geekbench 5.1 – Compute Vulkan

Unit: points

GPU closes the gap to the flagships

How much the Adreno GPU of the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 has inherited from the Snapdragon 8(+) Gen 1 cannot be said due to the lack of concrete statements from Qualcomm and general secrecy on the part of the manufacturer in this area. But one thing is certain: the latest architecture with hardware ray tracing and AV1 decoding is used exclusively by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (benchmarks). However, if it is the same GPU as in the Snapdragon 8(+) Gen 1, then the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 will either run it with fewer active execution units, a lower clock speed, or a combination of both, as the benchmark results suggest .

However, the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 manages to close the big gap to Qualcomm's premium series and also overtake some former flagships in the process. For example, the GPU is faster than the AMD/Samsung graphics unit in the Galaxy S22 Ultra's Exynos 2200 or the ARM GPU in the Pixel 7 Pro's Tensor G2. Qualcomm also moves ahead of the Snapdragon 778G(+) and 888 as well as the A13 Bionic of the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Unlike the CPU, however, there is a larger gap to the Snapdragon 8(+) Gen 1.

Diagrams

3DMark Unlimited – Wild Life Extreme (Metal/Vulkan)

Unit: Score GFXBench Offscreen – Aztec Ruins 1440p (High) (Metal/Vulkan)

Unit: frames per second (FPS) GFXBench Offscreen – Car Chase 1080p (Metal/OpenGL ES 3.1)

Unit: frames per second (FPS) GFXBench Offscreen – Manhattan 1080p (Metal/OpenGL ES 3.1)

Unit: frames per second (FPS) GFXBench Offscreen – Manhattan 1080p (OpenGL ES 3.0)

Unit: frames per second (FPS)

Conclusion

With the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, Qualcomm delivers a kind of Snapdragon 8(+) Gen 1 with an air flow limiter that is not allowed to run at full throttle. However, the chip successfully closes the previously larger gap to the flagships and overtakes many of the top models of the past year in terms of CPU and GPU. It remains questionable what the chip will cost a smartphone manufacturer to purchase and how many devices will actually use the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 after the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 was only available on the market in homeopathic doses. The larger IP from Arm and the modern production at TSMC should drive the price up, but with the more powerful GPU and details such as the modem and image processor (ISP), Qualcomm can take countermeasures thanks to solutions from its own hand. The first smartphones with Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 are to be presented by Realme and Redmi this month.

ComputerBase has received information about this article from Qualcomm under NDA. The only requirement was the earliest possible publication date.

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