At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit this year, the company once again announced its next-gen flagship chipset, this time calling it the Snapdragon 888. Expected to be called the Snapdragon 875, the successor to the 865, the higher number represented a more significant upgrade from its predecessor. Qualcomm has long labeled its 8 series as premium, so three 8s signified the best of the best.
Indeed, there's a lot going on with the new flagship SoC. The prime core is based on Cortex-X1, a newer, more customizable architecture. In fact, CPU performance should be up 25%. The Adreno 660 GPU promises 35% faster graphics rendering and 20% better power efficient. The new sixth-gen AI Engine is powered by the Hexagon 780 with 16 times the dedicated memory, three times the performance-per-watt, and it's capable of 26 TOPS.
Today, Qualcomm showed off the first official Snapdragon 888 benchmarks. Normally, journalists would be handed reference design units in a room at the Grand Wailea resort in Maui, but this year, there was no in-person event.
Along with the Snapdragon 888, the reference design unit includes 12GB LPDDR5 DRAM, 512GB storage, a 3,780mAh battery, a 6.65-inch 1080x2340 120fps display, and a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port. The Snapdragon 888 has a single 2.84GHz Cortex-X1 core, three 2.42GHz Cortex-A78 cores, and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 cores. Here are the results:
| Benchmark | Version | Mode | Average Score (Three Iterations) |
|---|---|---|---|
| AnTuTu | 8.3.4 | Default | 735,439 |
| Geekbench - single-core | 5.0.2 | 1,135 | |
| Geekbench - multi-core | 3,794 | ||
| GFXBench | 5.0, Aztec Ruins Vulkan (Normal tier) (1080p) (Offscreen IFH) | 86 | |
| 5.0, Manhattan 3.0 (1080p) (Offscreen) | 169 | ||
| Ludashi AIMark | 2.12 | 217,223 | |
| AITutu | 1.3.0 | 911,883 | |
| MLPerf (Unverified) | Image Classification | 801.94 | |
| Image Classificiation (Offline) | 918.53 | ||
| Object Detection | 368.38 | ||
| Image Segmentation | 127.52 | ||
| Language Processing | 8.96 | ||
| Procyon | 1.0.56 | 32,288 |
Obviously, the Snapdragon 888 is a big improvement on its predecessor. For CPU performance, the Snapdragon 865+-powered Legion Phone Duel got 979 on single-core and 3,409 on multi-core. For AnTuTu, the Snapdragon 888 offers an even bigger jump from 612,768 to 735,439.
Apple is still king on CPU performance though with the A14 Bionic in the iPhone 12 Pro Max, coming in at 1,597 for single-core and 4,169 on multi-core. The Snapdragon 888 comes out ahead on AnTuTu, with the iPhone scoring 624,232.
Snapdragon 888 devices are expected to start shipping in the first quarter of 2021.
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