Google’s Tensor G5 trails Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in raw power — but cost consciousness and an AI focus explain why Google’s okay with that.
Google’s Pixel 10 has plenty going for it — but top-tier performance remains as elusive as ever. It’s been this way for years, but rather than closing, the gap appears to have grown between the latest Tensor G5 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. With smartphones now defined by AI workloads and gaming prowess, the ballooning divide between Google’s Tensor and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon has never been more telling.
Recent Geekbench 6 and 3DMark benchmark results don’t paint Google’s latest processor in the best light. Qualcomm’s finest appears to be significantly faster, with over twice the multi-core CPU performance potential and graphics capabilities that are around 2.5x faster than Google’s.
On the one hand, this performance gap might not make much difference to browsing the web, swiping through social streams, or other applications that already run silky smooth. However, such a chasm in gaming performance with the impending bridging of phones and laptops is hard to ignore.
But why does Snapdragon come out so far ahead of Google’s Tensor project? To find out, we need to peel back the lid and see what makes these chips work.
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The central processing unit (CPU) is the main “brain” of your phone’s chipset, and recent developments have given Qualcomm’s Snapdragon a major boost. Qualcomm now designs its CPU cores in-house, under the Oryon branding, allowing it to accelerate its design in scale and size compared to Arm’s ready-made CPU blueprints — known as IP — that most chipmakers license rather than design themselves.
While all smartphone chips are based on Arm’s architecture, each CPU core’s building blocks and capabilities differ, with their own power, performance efficiency, and size trade-offs. This is at the heart of the discrepancy between Tensor and Snapdragon — and Qualcomm has chosen to take its CPU design in a slightly different direction from what its rivals buy in.
From what we know, Qualcomm’s custom Oryon CPU cores have two key design focuses. The first is that they’re clocked really quite high for mobile CPU cores, hitting a very fast 4.6GHz peak on the Prime core and 3.62GHz on the six Performance cores. By comparison, the Tensor G5 manages 3.78GHz on its single big Cortex-X4 core, 3.05GHz on its five middle A725 cores, and 2.25GHz on its two A520 efficiency cores. This is only for short bursts, but reveals that Qualcomm has spent considerable design effort on power rails, clock gating, and probably cache, too.
But clock speed is pretty meaningless when comparing different core microarchitectures. It’s more noteworthy that Oryon is reportedly a very big core, insinuating that it’s packed with cache and execution units that allow it to crunch numbers at lightning speed. However, this comes at a significant silicon expense that’s likely wasted when pruning your emails. Tensor, by comparison, is using just a single “big” Cortex-X4 core from Arm, paired with seven smaller and more efficient cores of various sizes.
Qualcomm also makes its own graphics component in the form of its in-house Adreno GPU architecture. Long departed from its original ATI design (Qualcomm bought out AMD’s mobile graphics division in 2009), Adreno has been free to dabble in Tile-Based and Immediate Mode Rendering, slice architecture designs, and the introduction of ray-tracing to suit Snapdragon’s mobile design goals at will.
