Credit: Robert Triggs / Android Authority
The mobile industry finds itself at yet another crossroads. On the one hand, we have Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite, offering astronomical levels of CPU and GPU performance that push our humble smartphones ever closer to the laptop sphere. On the other hand, we have Google and its Tensor project, seemingly far more content with “good enough” performance as long as it can power unique AI and photography features.
Of course, it would be wrong to frame this performance gap as solely an engineering choice. Qualcomm is reaping the benefits of a very expensive CPU division acquisition and decades of industry experience, while Google is only just crawling out of Samsung’s shadow to start on its independent chipset journey.