Qualcomm clears its own 13% CPU claim on prerelease reference hardware

The back of the reference designs got hot. Tom's Guide attributes a good chunk of the CPU gain to two new prime cores running at 5GHz, which Qualcomm bills as a first for smartphones ^[3][4]. Loading the background with apps and switching between them, the reviewer found the snappiness unaffected ^[15]. The same write-up warns that the cell in the test unit is not what a shipping ultra flagship will carry ^[17].

The measured figure sits three points above the claim, about a quarter more uplift than Qualcomm advertised ^[18]. The article describes its Geekbench, AnTuTu, 3DMark and AI runs but does not state the scores in its text ^[19], so the overshoot rests on one session with a reference design ^[7].

On the single-core result, Tom's Guide is blunt about what a person will notice: "you won't really feel that difference in real-world use in that gap" ^[6].

Apple's upscaling path, MetalFX, works from a lower-resolution image and tracks motion, contrast and edges to paint in missing pixels; Tom's Guide calls it "a bit of an old-fashioned way of going about it (and quite power intensive)" ^[10]. Qualcomm's stated purpose for Adreno Neural Fusion is power efficiency over long-term play, not the highest possible frame rate ^[11]. On Traverse benchmarks purpose-built for ANF, the reviewer reported a drastic reduction in total wattage plus better detailing on faces and terrain ^[12].

Players stay in one session on a phone that is already warm in their hand. A wattage drop on a demo Qualcomm built for its own feature is the narrowest possible version of that evidence, and it is the only version in the record so far ^[12].

So anyone placing an on-device feature this cycle has to work out which constraint decides it. If it is single-thread latency, Apple leads on this test set ^[5]. If it is sustained power draw during long GPU work, ANF is the thing to measure, and it has to be measured on a game people play ^[12]. And when the constraint is the size of the model that has to stay resident, the larger shared memory pool and the wider mixture-of-experts support are Extreme-tier only ^[13].

Qualcomm's word for the third case is the "agentic age", the idea of a phone that works for you, and the AI benchmarks in this session showed a sizeable uplift over previous generations ^[13][14]. Tom's Guide describes that goal as "starting to come into view, but we'll see how people feel about using this in practice" ^[14].