Qualcomm Teases Performance Of Its Powerful Snapdragon 845 Flagship SoC

Qualcomm’s next flagship Snapdragon (845) is almost here, so to get people excited about it, the company has released an onslaught of performance information. That said, with mobile chips, it’s not just performance that matters, but the overall feature set. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) aims to deliver the best of all worlds with its Snapdragon 845 – it’ll be fast, and packed with high-quality components and features that will translate into richer user experiences.

In December, Qualcomm gave us a good overview of what Snapdragon 845 would be giving us, but as is commonplace with early briefings, half of the important information (performance) was missing. At its 5G editor’s day held last week in San Diego, the company was kind enough to unveil just what it is we’ve been wanting to know.

To give some perspective to these results, I re-ran the same tests Qualcomm did on the OnePlus 5T, which sports the 845’s predecessor, 835. This gives us the best possible look at flagship to flagship. If you’re running a chip older than the Snapdragon 835, the gains are of course going to be much greater.

I should note that these are the “best case” results from Qualcomm, and that on some runs, the results could be slightly less. The overall difference is minor, though, such as 8300-8400 for GeekBench. That being the case, it’s clear that the 845 makes some major performance leaps from one generation to the next, offering about a 25% boost in CPU (according to GeekBench), and about a 60% gain in graphics (according to GFXBench).

If Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) gave us these kinds of performance gains from one generation to the next, I don’t think people would have found themselves so bored with the desktop CPU market until AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) came along with Ryzen. Gains of 25% on the CPU are impressive enough, but on top of that, we also see a major gain in GPU performance. Companies like Samsung want us to plug our phones into a screen so we can use them as a PC, and with a performance uplift like this, that idea is becoming more alluring.

As mentioned before, benchmarking only shows half of the picture here. While it’s great to have a phone that’s definitively powerful, it’s also nice to have one that has quality sensors and chips to enhance everything else we do with our phone, from taking photos to inferencing solutions with AI.

In particular, Qualcomm says that its 845 will improve connectivity, photography (and video), VR/AR, audio, security, and of course, battery-life. Battery-life also includes the charging aspect, although I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m pretty happy with how fast today’s phones charge. Qualcomm already boasts 5 hours of battery-life from 5 minutes of charging with Quick Charge 4, which is pretty satisfactory.

Nonetheless, Mobile World Congress takes place in Barcelona at the end of the month, so we’ll undoubtedly be learning of some Snapdragon 845-powered devices there. The event can’t get here soon enough…