Snapdragon 898 benchmarks appear – and it could power the Huawei P60

It's generally assumed that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 mobile chipset will shortly be appearing as the heir to the Snapdragon 888 and 888 Plus for top-end Android handsets, and a couple of new leaks provide more evidence that it's on the way.

First tipster Abhishek Yadav has spotted what might well be the Snapdragon 898 on the popular Geekbench benchmarking database: it appears to be inside a prototype Vivo phone, and while the posted scores are relatively low, this will be because the hardware is still in development.

Specs enthusiasts will want to know that the chipset features a Cortex-X2 Super Core running at 2.42GHz, three 2.17GHz Cortex-A710 Power cores, and four efficiency 1.79GHz Cortex-A510 cores. We should hear more about the Snapdragon 898 later this year.

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Huawei we go

The second Snapdragon 898-related leak to pop up on social media this weekend relates to the upcoming Huawei P60, with well-known leaker Digital Chat Station (via Notebookcheck) confident that the Qualcomm processor is going to show up in the 2022 flagship phones from Huawei.

It's very early days for Huawei P60 rumors, considering that the Huawei P50 models have only just made their debut in China, but it makes sense that there would be a chipset upgrade in another 12 months or so.

Huawei has been struggling to find processors to run its phones, what with the intricacies of its US trade ban to get around, but it has managed to source some Snapdragon 888 chips for the P50 series of phones, and it sounds as though it's going to repeat the trick next year with the Snapdragon 898.

Analysis: Qualcomm plots a strong 2022

You may well have noticed that Google is switching to its own silicon with the Google Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, and with Apple and Samsung making their own chipsets as well, that leaves Qualcomm with a slice of the market that's shrinking year after year.

There are still plenty of phones for Snapdragon chips to make their way into of course, from manufacturers including Nokia, OnePlus, Motorola and others, but Qualcomm will be hoping that its processors are going to make a big impression in 2022.

The Snapdragon 898 (if indeed that's what it ends up being called) is going to be crucial to that: it will need to boost smartphone performance and capabilities, while also cutting down on power draw and boosting battery life for the devices that it's installed in.

We got our first official look at the Snapdragon 888 back in December 2020, so December 2021 seems like a good bet for when its successor might appear – and at its unveiling we should hear a lot more about what's in store for smartphones over the course of 2022.

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