Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, Dimensity 9500 to Gain ARM’s SME

Qualcomm and MediaTek have made significant strides in closing the technological gap with Apple Silicon by using TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process for their Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 chipsets. Yet neither one had an SME, so their performance was bottlenecked anyway.

Now, according to tipster Ice universe, the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 and Dimensity 9500 will bring SME support, which should equal Apple at least when performing sophisticated workloads. The latter of which is a predicted 20% performance improvement, both in single-core and multi-core use cases.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2, Dimensity 9500 to Support ARM’s SME, Boosting Performance by 20%

Highly efficient processing of demanding workloads propelled Apple’s M4, also based on the ARMv9 architecture, to just shy of 4000 points in Geekbench 6’s single-core benchmarking test. The M4 Max in the high-end MacBook Pro models now does this level of performance without needing extra cooling. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 and Dimensity 9500 could match those numbers next year with some SME help.

We are not sure why the Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 lack support for SMEs, but we suspect it may be related to the legacy ARMv8 architecture they are otherwise based on. According to tipster Jukanlosreve, Qualcomm’s flagship SoC for 2024 will be a mix of Samsung’s 2nm GAA process, called ‘SF2,’ while also sourcing from TSMC’s 3nm N3P node.

However, Qualcomm may be forced to turn to Samsung, but only if Samsung can get yields under control—something that has been a challenge for the Korean company’s first and second-gen 3nm GAA process. For MediaTek, which has strong ties with TSMC, it is unlikely that the company will use technology from Samsung but this would be a fatal decision because prices on advanced lithography wafers continue to grow.

While we have scant details on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 and Dimensity 9500, it’s believed that Qualcomm’s ultimate performance chipset for 2025 will come with a maximum performance core frequency of 5.00GHz, the rest of the CPU cluster remains unchanged from the Snapdragon 8 Elite.

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