Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 vs Apple M2

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.

Apple M2

The Apple M2 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2022 MacBook Air and, MacBook Pro 13. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 16 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with  up to 2,4 GHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with up to 3,5 GHz and therefore higher than the M1 cores. The architecture should be similar to the A15 (iPhone 13) with Avalanche and Blizzard cores.

The chip features a unified memory architecture for the CPU and GPU cores and supports up to 24 GB LPDDR5-6400 for a bandwidth of up to 100GB/s.

According to Apple, the M2 offers a 18% higher CPU performance at the same power consumption level compared to the Apple M1. In our tests, the MacBook Pro 13 with active cooling was able to reach the 18% in Geekbench Multi. In other benchmarks we measured 12 to 15% gains compared to the M1. Therefore, the performance is now near the M1 Pro with 8 cores. The passively cooled MacBook Air may however suffer from throttling in longer load scenarios.

The integrated graphics card in the M2 offers 8 or 10 cores and a peak performance of 3.6 TFLOPs.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 16 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M2 includes 20 billion transistors (up from the 16 billion of the M1) and is manufactured in the second generation 5nm process at TSMC (most likely N5P). The power consumption is rated at 20W what we also measured under CPU load.