The Snapdragon 855 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2019
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 15, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- SoCs
- 7nm
- Snapdragon 855
Final Thoughts
2018 has been a very successful year for Qualcomm and the Snapdragon 845. The company had provided an extremely solid and well-rounded SoC for device vendors to build their flagship devices on- and by the looks of it the Snapdragon 855 continues this trend.
I’ve been a bit sceptical about the merits of Qualcomm’s 1+3 CPU configuration, however after seeing the preliminary performance and power efficiency figures of the new prime core on the new chipset, I’m not nearly as concerned. We reserve any final verdict for when we will have tested final commercial devices, as that’s where in the end we’ll also see the efficiency effect of the non-prime cores, and how they’ll position themselves against the competition.
Performance wise, the Snapdragon 855 is a bit odd. In steady-state workloads like SPEC the chipset is seemingly performing very well and matches or exceeds the new Kirin 980. Here Qualcomm’s changes to the CPU microarchitecture might even actually be visible in the test results, which is a nice feat. Unfortunately the memory subsystem still seems to include some of DRAM latency regressions that we also saw in the Snapdragon 845, both which are due to Qualcomm’s system level cache.
Real-world performance, while still excellent, doesn’t quite manage to reach my expectations I had for the chipset. Here for whatever reason, the chip’s improvements are not nearly as pronounced as in the more synthetic tests. Again the odd thing is that the Kirin 980 still manages to beat the Snapdragon 855 in near most of these workloads. Qualcomm had reasoned that the microarchitectural changes to the CPU were meant to help web browser performance, yet it’s here where the chip slightly lags behind the competition – I do wonder if this is a case of the CPU again being limited by either Qualcomm’s choice of more conservative caches or due to the latency penalty of the system cache.
Although the performance shown today is exemplary, it still does look maybe a little rough around the edges in some of our system performance tests – here maybe Qualcomm will be able to investigate and further improve things until we actually see commercial devices.
Whether the system performance will be improved in final devices or not, what is clear though is that power efficiency looks outstanding. Qualcomm had me worried as the PR teams had avoided talking about efficiency during the chipset’s launch, but the results today (even if they’ll need to be verified), look very promising and should result in notable battery life improvements in 2019’s devices.
On the GPU side of things, Qualcomm’s more muted performance projections of 20% were because the company has again focused a good part of the process improvements into bringing the overall power back down from the usually higher levels that we saw on the Snapdragon 845.
Overall – the Snapdragon 855 looks to be another extremely well executed SoC from Qualcomm, and I’m looking forward to validating the results and testing out the first commercial devices once they become available.
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genekellyjr - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
You might be clueless too! There weren't any "4k rendering" benchmarks in that link - but there were 4k encoding benchmarks.And as for that encoding performance you are apparently referencing, it is definitely using fixed function encoders - it's not the CPU performance as Geekbench tests use (and I want to stress cross-platform Geekbench isn't 1:1 scoring - you'll never find Andandtech comparing various CPU architectures with Geekbench as it even uses fixed function resources like AES in its crypto stuff). And the speeds the laptops show definitely point to a CPU encoder being used. A fixed function encoder will barely hit the CPU, while CPU encoding will max those cores at 100%. The CPU encoding is higher quality at the cost of heat and speed.
Recently Adobe updated Premier to support Intel's fixed function encoder (called quick sync) read here http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?362263-Ad... post #8 - and Rush may not have gotten that update yet or the benchmark site referenced didn't update their program https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/new-ipad... but I managed to find a benchmark for the quick sync in Premier https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/101459 - and Intel's quick sync fixed function stuff is all relatively the same afaik so the desktop CPU has less of an impact - gives a 1:20 min 4K -> 1080p conversion at 91 sec w/ CPU and 45 sec w/ fixed function, scale that up to 12 min (x9) and we get 13:39 w/ CPU (it's a nice CPU, i7-8700K) and the fixed function encoder gets 6:45. It'll probably scale pretty linearly. So 6:45 vs 7:47 with fixed function encoding - which isn't comparing CPUs at all at this point but rather their fixed function encoder!
So the iPad has some nice hardware, sure, but it's not outperforming Intel's brand new MB Pro 13" by leaps and bounds. They'll probably be about the same speed with fixed function encoding and the MB Pro 13" will win in a non-encoder setting thanks to its increased TDP.
darkich - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Okay.. So in short, the A12X is "about the same" in CPU performance as Intel's actively cooled, CPU-specific and twice more power hungry chip while also having a 1+TFLOPS GPU, 4G modem and advanced ISP on the same die.Overall, if that is what you call "nice", then Intel's hardware is what?
Trash.
Rudde - Friday, January 18, 2019 - link
Let's compare Intel i7-8500Y and Apple A12X. The i7-8500Y is a dual core 5W 14nm notebook/tablet processor. A12X is a octa core 7nm tablet processor with unknown power usage. 8500Y uses the x86-64 instruction set, while A12X uses ARMv8. They have very few benchmarks in common, which introduces notable amounts of uncertainty.Let's start with Geekbench 4.1/4.2 Single threaded:
8500Y scored 4885 and A12X 4993. A12X leads with 2%, which is within margin of error.
Same benchmark, but multithreaded:
8500Y scored 8225 and A12X 17866. A12X demolishes the dual core with 117% higher performance. This is clearly because of the 4-core-cluster in A12X having double core count compared with the dual core 8500Y.
Next up we have Mozilla Kraken 1.1 showing browser performance:
8500Y scores 1822ms and A12X 609ms. The A12X took 67% less time to complete the task, which amounts to a 199% increase in performance.
Octane V2 is another browser performance benchmark:
8500Y scores 24567 and A12X 45080. A12X bests the Intel cpu by 83%.
3D Mark has two versions of Ice Storm Physics and unfortunately our processors use different versions. They use the same resolution however.
8500Y scores 25064 in standard physics and A12X 39393 in unlimited physics. A12X scores a 57% lead.
It's hard to establish system performance with such a limited amount of benchmarks. Geekbench and 3DMark are synthetics and the two others show browser performance.
The processors are equal in ST, but the A12Xs higher core count allows it to double the 8500Ys MT score. The A12X outpaces the 8500Y in 3dMark. The A12X is clearly superior in browser performance. Apples A12 drops closer to the Intel in synthetics, but performs similar to it's larger sibling in web benchmarks.
Winner: A12X
Nemaca - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Overall, the 855 was thought to be head and shoulders above Kirin, but it seems that it will be on the same level at best.I'm typing this from my already heavily used mate 20pro, so if the US wouldn't nuke Huawei global-wide right now, the Kirin would certainly push ahead, which I hope it will do, since it seems more competitive price-wise.
Huawei bypassed the power issue with larger batteries, but to be honest, the Kirin doesn't seem to be that hungry anyway.
For me, the 855 is a letdown, I was hoping for more, but it seems my mate20pro will be relevant for longer then I thought, so not too bad of a news, I guess.
Thank you, Andrei, for the in-depth review!
Achtung_BG - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
Snapdragon 855 .......https://youtu.be/mqFLXayD6e8
darkich - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
This here proves once and for all that your system performance benchmarks are just bogus and irrelevant.Are we seriously supposed to believe that Snapdragon actually made a lower performing chipset than their previous one?
BS
darkich - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
*Qualcomm, not SnapdragonIcehawk - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
It's happened before in the chase for efficiencynpp - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
I really doubt we’ll see battery life improve much with this generation. Hint - 5G. Maybe that’s why 855 focuses on overall efficiency, and the GPU gains are modest. Let’s hope I’m wrong.Impulses - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Yeah, that's the big wrench in the works... Hopefully there's at least *some* flagships without 5G! Though I doubt I'll be looking for an upgrade from my Pixel 3 this year or next.