Qualcomm’s brand-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 is a highly-integrated mobile SoC (System on Chip) design built on a bleeding-edge 4nm manufacturing process using a hybrid architecture of the latest Arm core technologies, along with custom AI, security and graphics engines, and the company’s latest advanced 5G Modem-RF technology. Today, the company has allowed independent benchmark test results of a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 prototype device to be published, and the early numbers are promising. The crew at HotHardware, along with smartphone aficionado Myriam Joire, took the new Snapdragon test vehicle around a benchmark gauntlet test track. While there were some modest gains in general compute workloads, this early look also showed AI and gaming performance gains that were off-the-charts.