The Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor was announced on December 2, 2020. The high-end SoC is set to power some of 2021’s fastest smartphones with Qualcomm promising up to a 25% improvement in CPU performance and 35% improvement in graphics processing. Now, we’re getting our first look at benchmarks from the beastly Snapdragon 888, and at first looks, it is quite impressive.
It should be noted, that all these benchmarks come directly from Qualcomm running on an unspecified reference phone. Not to mention, that benchmarks don’t always tell the full story in performance. Just be aware that the following numbers are lab tests under the best conditions and not real-world performance numbers.
Let’s kick things off with the AnTuTu score, where the Snapdragon 888 turned in a score of 735439. For reference, the Galaxy Note 20 powered by Snapdragon 865+ currently has a score of 603352 according to AnTuTu’s rankings. As you can see, that’s quite the improvement, and it currently outranks the top phone on AnTuTu, which is the Huawei Mate 40 Pro with a total of 661059.
Next up, we have the Geekbench scores, where the Snapdragon 888 scored a 1135 in single-core speeds and 3794 in multi-core with the reference device. To put that in perspective, the top-ranking Android device according to Geekbench is the OnePlus 8 with a single-core score of 886 and multi-core score of 3199 running the Snapdragon 865 SoC.
The all-new Snapdragon 888 easily leaves the Snapdragon 865 and 865+ in the dust, and this is exactly what we’d expect to see from Qualcomm’s latest and greatest chipset. Of course, as I mentioned above, these scores come from an ideal lab environment. Once we see some phones running the Snapdragon 888 in real-world conditions, we can expect to see how the benchmark scores from Qualcomm’s reference device hold up.
Fortunately, we shouldn’t have to wait long. Samsung’s Galaxy S21 series of phones are launching January 14, 2021, and they are expected to run the latest Snapdragon chip, as is the OnePlus 9 set to be revealed in March 2021.