Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC Benchmarked Ahead of Debut, Shows Off Impressive Scores

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 SoC is all set to hit the market as several flagship phones are set to make a debut with it at MWC 2018 in Barcelona. The chipmaker recently made the Snapdragon 845 SoC available for benchmark tests, which revealed its several features and capabilities. We can expect this SoC to power the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 range (in US and China) and the upcoming Xiaomi Mi MIX 2s.

Starting off with the basics, the Snapdragon 845 comes with four Kryo 385 Gold (Cortex-A75) and four Kryo 385 Silver (Cortex-A55) cores. Maximum frequency on the Snapdragon 845 has been beefed up to 2.8GHz, compared to the 2.45GHz on last year's Snapdragon 835. It has been built on the second-generation 10nm LPP process, and features the new Adreno 630 GPU. This is also the company's first System-on-Chip to support DynamiQ, which gives it a more efficient voltage control.

AnandTech recently got hold of the Snapdragon 845 and put it to the GeekBench 4 benchmark test. In terms of integer performance, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC scores an average of 31 percent higher absolute performance compared to its predecessor. In terms of floating point performance, there is up to 60.5 percent uptick compared to the Snapdragon 835. Overall, the new flagship SoC has 48 percent more Octane performance and 34 percent more GeekBench performance than last year's variant.

In terms of PCMark Work 2.0 tests on processes like Web browsing, video editing, data manipulation, and photo editing, the Snapdragon 845 SoC scored more than the flagship phones of 2017 including the Google Pixel 2 XL and Samsung Galaxy S9. In terms of video editing, however, it scored below the Pixel 2 XL - though AnandTech says this test is not necessarily representative of performance. On Web browsing tests that include Apple devices, like the WebXPRT 2015 and Speedometer 2.0, the iPhone X and iPhone 8's Apple A11 Bionic SoC outperformed the Snapdragon 845.

Talking about the graphics performance, the Adreno GPU on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 scores well over its predecessor with a 14 percent increase in physics performance and about 25 percent increase in overall GPU performance over last year's Adreno 540. It was, however, not capable of matching Apple's A11 chip in the GFXBench T-Rex 2.7 off-screen and Manhattan 3.1 off-screen tests. It did beat the A11 in the 3DMark Sling Shot 3.1 Extreme Unlimited Graphics, Physics, and Overall tests however, by quite a margin.

Speaking on the performance comparison with the iPhone X, AnandTech's Ryan Smith and Andrei Frumusanu said, "When we're looking at competitor devices we see only the the iPhone X able to compete with the last generation Snapdragon 835 devices - however with a catch. The A11 is severely thermally constrained and is only able to achieve these scores when the devices are cold. Indeed as seen from the smaller score of the iPhone 8, the SoC isn't able to sustain maximum performance for even one benchmark run before having to throttle."

Considering benchmark scores, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 SoC is expected to be one of the fastest alternatives available for non-Apple smartphones in 2018. We are yet to see the benchmark performance of the Samsung Exynos 9810 SoC expected to power the Galaxy S9 duo in several international markets including India.