Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs MediaTek Dimensity 800

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform is a high-end SoC for smartphones that was introduced in late 2022 and manufactured in 4 nm at TSMC (N4P). It integrates four different CPU clusters. A fast and big prime core based on the ARM Cortex-X3 architecture and clocked at up to 3.2 GHz for 64 bit applications. Two more ARM Cortex-A715 based performance cores clocked at up to 2.8 GHz (also only for 64 bit apps). Two more Cortex-A710 performance cores at up to 2.8 GHz that can also be used for older apps and three efficiency cores (ARM Cortex-A510 with up to 2 GHz). All cores can use the shared 8 MB level 3 cache.

Thanks to the new architecture and high clock rates, the SD 8 Gen 2 is the fastest mobile CPU for Android based devices and is only topped by current Apple SoCs like the Apple A16 (see benchmarks below).

The chip also integrates a Hexagon accelerator for AI workloads (tensor, scalar and vector). Qualcomm states that its one of the first chips with INT4 support and up to 4.35x performance compared to the previous generation. 

The 18-Bit-Spectra ISP is able to process photos with up to 200 MP and work with videos up to 8k30 (including 10-bit, HDR10+, HLG and Dolby Vision).

A big improvement of the Snapdragon 8 G2 is the integrated Adreno 740 GPU, that now supports Hardware Raytracing and tops even the iGPU in the Apple A16.

The integrated AI Engine can offer up to 4x faster AI performance thanks to the bigger Tensor engine. The 18-Bit-Spectra-ISP also saw some big improvements and is now called Snapdragon Sight.

The integrated Adreno 730 offers a 30% graphics boost compared to the previous Adreno 660.

The integrated Snapdragon X70 5G modem is also new as is the FastConnect 7800 modem with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 support.

MediaTek Dimensity 800

The Mediatek Dimensity 800 is a fast mid-range SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It includes four fast ARM Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2 GHz and four power efficient Cortex-A55 cores at up to 2 GHz (Octa-Core with Heterogeneous Multi-Processing). Furthermore, the chip integrates a 4 core ARM Mali-G57 MC4 GPU, a Wi-fi 5 modem, a LPDDR4x memory controller(up to 16 GB with 2133 MHz), a AI processing unit (APU 3.0) and video de- and encoding.

Compared to the similar named Dimensity 800U, the 800 offers two more big A76 cores but clocked 400 MHz lower. This means the single core performance is lower, but the multi-core performance can be better.

The Dimensity 800 is manufactured in the modern 7nm process and should be very power efficient.