Looking at the upcoming chipset from Qualcomm, we cannot help but wonder if we should be excited by that 50% increase in performance. You would say we are crazy not to be pleased about the improvement, but it does come with a catch.
First of all, let’s see what it offers: 50% more performance and efficiency for increased battery life compared to the predecessor Snapdragon 845. More power? Great! Longer battery life? Better!
Snapdragon 855 Benchmark Results
Looking at the SPECInt2006 benchmark, we see some interesting results.
It seems that the 855 is 40% better than the 845 regarding performance and almost 45% in battery life. The test shows that the 855 is far better than any other chips – except for the A11 Monsoon and A12 Vortex (Apple), and almost similar to the Android Kirin 980 chip (Huawei). The only difference between the Kirin 980 chip and Snapdragon 855 is that the former’s cores are not clocked as high as Qualcomm’s cores. They both use the Cortex-A76 design from ARM.
But will these performances translate in real-world speed in devices?
We’ll have to wait and see it in future devices but bear in mind that software load will continue to get higher and manufacturers will want to do get the most of the powerful chips. This might translate in not so visible improvements regarding performance.
What we can expect is the jump in battery life from 6 hours of screen-on time in a single charge for a Snapdragon 845 flagship to almost 9 hours for a future Snapdragon 855 flagship.
As for performance, we would be excited if it were not for developers that keep building apps that are more powerful as the chips gain power. What we will see over the years is increased battery time as we saw in laptops which in 2006 only lasted 3-4 hours on a charge and today, the ones with the longest battery life on a charge can last almost 16 hours.
Agnes is a technical writer, being in touch with reports to come up with the latest tech leaks.