Benchmarks show performance gains Qualcomm Snapdragon 865

Several sites have published the first benchmark results of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, the soc that appears in many high-end smartphones of 2020. According to the tests, the performance is another step forward compared to the predecessors.

Media present at the unveiling of the Snapdragon 865 in Hawaii in early December were allowed to publish the first performance tests of the soc on Monday that they could run on reference devices. The results are a first indication; final results may be slightly higher or lower next year due to manufacturers’ optimizations or conservative performance settings, respectively.

Hardware Info arrives at a 33 percent performance gain over the Snapdragon 855 in PCMark’s Work 2.0 test, with underlying scores ranging from 10 to 76 percent. Compared to the Snapdragon 855+, the performance gain is 18.3 percent. Especially with workloads with peak load there is speed gain, with sustained workloads such as video editing it is less, probably due to throttling. At GFXBench, the profit of the 865 against the 855 and 855+ is successively 22.6 and 8.2 percent. Computerbase held a throttle test for the GPU at GFXBench where the 865 recorded 88fps permanently.

At AnandTech, the Mate 30 Pro’s Kirin 990 scores higher over the Snapdragon 865 on default settings. On the aggressive Performance setting, the 865 scores a lot better, although that setting will not be implemented by many manufacturers. With this setting, the chipset goes faster to its maximum clock speeds and the frugal cores are also clocked higher than with the default setting. AnandTech further notes that while the GPU of the soc has become more powerful, Apple is doing better with its A12 and A13 in terms of performance per watt.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 865 in early December. The soc has eight Kryo 585 cores clocked at up to 2.84GHz and based on Arm’s Cortex-A77 design. The GPU is the Adreno 650. The upcoming high-end Snapdragon can, among other things, be combined with a maximum of 16GB lpddr5 memory and capture 4k videos at 120fps. The processor can drive screens with qhd+ resolution at 144Hz.