The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 will power the best Android phones of 2018. And, if the recent speed test of the processor is to be believed, the smartphones carrying it would be lightning fast. Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus would supposedly be the first smartphones to be powered by Qualcomm’s latest flagship.
Qualcomm invited several journalists and tech experts to test the Snapdragon 845. While offering the processor for testing purposes, Qualcomm claimed that it is 25% faster than the predecessor – the Snapdragon 835.
For testing the new processor, the company made available the Qualcomm reference design (QRD) phone. The smartphone is basically used for development and testing rather than for commercial purposes.
According to CNET, they ran a total of 12 tests on the QRD phone with the latest processor. For comparison, CNET performed similar tests on the top smartphones of 2017 – the Galaxy Note 8, Pixel 2 XL and LG V30. All three used last year’s Snapdragon 835.
“The 845 device performed at least 25 percent faster than the best score on all but four tests out of the dozen,” CNET said.
When it comes to scores, AnTuTu scores are widely trusted. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 845 is expected to hit a minimum of 265500 with a possible higher score of 267000. According to Android Headlines, in their testing they found that the 845 processor remained in the aforementioned range but at the lower band.
In their first run, the Snapdragon 845 settled at 265613, while in the second run, the score went up slightly to 265632. With the third test, a drop in the performance was registered with the score coming in at 265020. However, experts believe that the AnTuTu test is quite demanding, and therefore, a drop in the performance is expected.
Overall, according to AH, the Snapdragon 845 performed better over the 835 powered devices with the Pixel 2 scoring 201032 and the Note 8 scoring 200284.
Separately, the Snapdragon 845 scored 8,427 on TechRadar’s Geekbench test. This, according to TechRadar, is the highest for a phone running Android 8.0 Oreo. Further, the results prove that the new chip is 30% faster than the phones based on the Snapdragon 835. More importantly, it is 27% faster than Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which runs on Huawei’s in-house Kirin 970 chipset.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 is based on the edgy 10nm LPP FinFET manufacturing process and a brand new architecture to boost the power efficiency and performance. The processor is based on the new Kyro 385 CPU powered with the four-high performance cores operating at 2.8 GHz and four efficiency cores set at 1.7GHz. There is also 2MB of shared L3 cache along with the 3MB of system cache. Experts believe that such specs would help the processor to play heavy apps such as 3D gaming, augmented reality and virtual reality.
“The videos you capture are going to be more lifelike than they were before,” says Qualcomm’s Vice President of Product Management, Tim Leland, according to TechRadar. “We’re going to see an increase in the quality of pixels, not just the quantity of pixels.”
Apart from Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus, other phones expected to come with Qualcomm’s latest processor are: Google Pixel 3, LG G7, ZTE Axon 9, Moto Z3 Force and more.
