author: Bart Swiatek
Snapdragon 855 is faster by up to 74% than its precedessor
Benchmarks of Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 chip have appeared on the web. The results suggest that we are dealing with a product that is much faster than its predecessor, but not necessarily performing better than the latest processor from Apple.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- Snapdragon 855 is definitely faster than Snapdragon 845 - it performs better in benchmarks by 20-74%;
- In the AnTutu test the chip has defeated the A12 Bionic from Apple (which scored 7% better), but in the rest the chip did much worse;
- The benchmarks did not test the AI stress performance, which is expected to be one of the main advantages of Snapdragon 855.
The first benchmarks of Qualcomm's new processing unit, the Snapdragon 855, have appeared on the web. It seems that the new SoC is doing quite well, significantly improving the performance of its predecessor, Snapdragon 845. In one of the Speedometer tests, we see a 216% jump in performance, but even without taking into account this extreme result (and the equally extreme 0% in the ES 2.0 T-Rex 1080), we see an increase of 20-74%.
Qualcomm chip was also compared to Apple's A12 Bionic processor (known from iPhone Xs), but in this case the results are not clear. In the AnTutu benchmark Qualcomm product is 7% faster (mainly due to GPU performance, although it is worth noting that the table probably also contains some bugs - memory test results do not match the percentage result), but in Geekbench, Jetstream 1.1 and Speedometer are doing much worse than the US solution.
Snapdragon 855 was made in 7nm production process and is based on Cortex-A76 architecture from ARM Holdings. It uses the Kryo 485 8-core CPU (with variable core timing - 2.84 GHz for the strongest, Prime Core), the Adreno 640 GPU and the Hexagon 690 chip responsible for AI computing. Unfortunately, the latter aspect of Snapdragon 855's performance has not been tested in these benchmarks - which is important as Qualcomm considers it to be crucial (reportedly, it may result in an actual performance increase of 300-400%, although it may only be the manufacturer's boast).
It is worth noting that each of the tests was carried out three times. The results shown above are the average of these tests. The benchmarks were carried out on a reference device, which means that the actual performance of mobile phones based on this chip may differ slightly from what we see in the tables. The first announced device based on this technology will be the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT smartphone, which will be released on 29 January.