Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Reference Prototype



Qualcomm's new Adreno 630 integrated GPU core is destined to make a big leap in performance over its predecessor as well, with up to a 30 percent increase in graphics throughput, allowing the Snapdragon 845 to become the first mobile platform to enable room-scale VR/AR experiences that support 6 degrees of freedom, along with simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. It should also translate into superior overall gaming performance compared to the Snapdragon 835, which was employed in many of the top flagship Android phones launched during 2017.

th . But until then, we have pulled some early benchmarks from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 platform reference device (see above), to give you a general idea of what kind of performance to expect from this upcoming wave of 2018 Android flagship phones. Two of the first smartphones that will take advantage of the Snapdragon 845 include Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ , which will make their world debut on February 25. But until then, we have pulled some early benchmarks from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 platform reference device (see above), to give you a general idea of what kind of performance to expect from this upcoming wave of 2018 Android flagship phones.





Of course, as Qualcomm notes in the slide above, benchmarks don't tell the whole story. It's what smartphone OEMs build with a powerful processing engine and mobile platform, along with the features and functionality they can enable with it. Regardless, we're sure many of you still want to know how this new hot rod chip handles in the turns, so let's get on with it, shall we?



Update - 2/12/2018, 5:00 PM - We are updating a few of our benchmark graphs with scores from the iPhone X and its A11 Bionic processor, as an additional reference point for a flagship Apple device. We don’t have results for every test because not all benchmarks are cross-platform compatible, nor do they present identical workloads across different mobile operating systems. As a result, we're including only those we feel present a level playing field.



GeekBench 4.0 Synthetic CPU Testing

In our first test, Geekbench, we're stressing only CPU cores in a handset (not graphics), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The test is comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations, and other general purpose compute processing.

Qualcomm's reference smartphone isn't exactly as polished as you'll see with final retail smartphones when they hit the market, but it definitely gets the job done and is intended to flesh out every single feature of this new mobile platform - so it's jammed-packed with all the bells and whistles. It also of course packs a Snapdragon 845 SoC, which in this case is paired with 6GB of RAM. In addition, this particular unit has 64GB of internal storage. To cap things off, the reference design is running Android 8.0 Oreo Of course, as Qualcomm notes in the slide above, benchmarks don't tell the whole story. It's what smartphone OEMs build with a powerful processing engine and mobile platform, along with the features and functionality they can enable with it. Regardless, we're sure many of you still want to know how this new hot rod chip handles in the turns, so let's get on with it, shall we?- We are updating a few of our benchmark graphs with scores from the iPhone X and its A11 Bionic processor, as an additional reference point for a flagship Apple device. We don’t have results for every test because not all benchmarks are cross-platform compatible, nor do they present identical workloads across different mobile operating systems. As a result, we're including only those we feel present a level playing field.In our first test, Geekbench, we're stressing only CPU cores in a handset (not graphics), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The test is comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations, and other general purpose compute processing.

Right out of the gate, the Snapdragon 845 is flexing its muscle, improving on the Snapdragon 835's numbers by roughly 30 percent. In multi-core testing, the Snapdragon 845 achieves about a 26 percent performance uplift compared to the Motorola Moto Z2 Force , which was last year's speed demon in the flagship Android smartphone class for this benchmark. Versus the iPhone X and its A11 Bionic processor, Apple's tight coupling of silicon platform with its iOS operating system shows its prowess as well. That said, the Snapdragon 845 remains competitive and brings the Android platform back on par for next generations devices, versus the best Apple has to offer currently.



Next up, we're using the JetStream benchmark for Javascript performance and RightWare’s Web Test 3.0 for comprehensive, mixed-media web performance analysis, including

Next up, we're using the JetStream benchmark for Javascript performance and RightWare’s Web Test 3.0 for comprehensive, mixed-media web performance analysis, including HTML5 rendering. Here we'll primarily determine how the the Snapdragon 845 SoC handles this workload, along with the Android Oreo operating system and Chrome web browser...

JetStream And Basemark Web 3.0 JavaScript and Browser Performance Testing



Not surprisingly, the Snapdragon 845 runs away from the pack compared to the current crop of Android smartphones. The new chip easily tops the charts, which bodes well for overall browsing performance on this year's incoming class of flagship Android devices.

Futuremark PCMark For Android General Purpose Pocket Computing Performance Metrics