Qualcomm’s new top-of-the-line Snapdragon 888 platform is expected to make its commercial debut in the coming months. While we await confirmation on when those smartphones will launch, it went ahead and shared results of its performance on major benchmarks.
Benchmarks are a common way to assess a chipset’s performance in aspects such as processing power, AI, 5G, cameras, etc. It’s a practice that is used to compare the improvements and advancements enabled with each new generation. However, these should only be considered as a representation, as there are affected by various other factors such as performance tweaks, storage speeds, operating temperature, optimizations, display refresh rates, software skins and more. Real-life mileage is likely to vary.
For this set of tests, Qualcomm used a premium tier Snapdragon 888 reference smartphone at default settings, balancing performance and efficiency. It is the first CPU to implement the new Arm Cortex X1 performance core, clocked at 2.84GHz, followed by three cores at 2.42GHz and four lower-power cores at 1.8GHz. Along with that, the device had 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS storage — high-end specs chosen on purpose to not act as bottlenecks for the Snapdragon 888. Here’s how it fared.
In AnTuTu, it scored a whopping 7,35,439 points, beating the Kirin 9000-powered Huawei Mate 40 Pro for the top spot. While not a direct comparison, it also narrowly edges past the Apple iPad Pro 3 (2018). The fact that the new 5nm A14 Bionic is shown to be slower is another indication of how unreliable these comparisons can be.
Geekbench paints a much more digestible picture with the Snapdragon 888 scoring 3,794 and 1,125 in multi-core and single-core tests respectively. For context, the current leader from the Android camp is the OnePlus 8 at 3,201 and 886. However, it’s still far behind the iPhone 12 Pro’s 1,585 and 3,928. Scores of other popular benchmarks can be found in the table below.
| Benchmark | Score |
|---|---|
| AnTuTu | 735439 |
| Geekbench (multi-core) | 3794 |
| Geekbench (single-core) | 1135 |
| GFX Bench (Manhattan) | 169 |
| GFX Bench (Aztec ruins) | 86 |
| Ludashi AIMark | 217223 |
| AITuTu | 911883 |
| Procyon | 32288 |
When Snapdragon 888 phones do come out in Q1, OEMs will have the option to choose the operating point for their design, if they wish to prioritise performance or efficiency. If the rumours are to be believed, the Xiaomi Mi 11 will draw first blood as early as the end of this month.
