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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
132 Comments
View All Comments
WildBikerBill - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
What I want to know is...now that we know the high end, what do the affordable mid-range products become?B3an - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
This SoC is VERY disappointing. Wont be upgrading this year to any phone that has this.Hopefully Samsungs new SoC for 2019 is much MUCH better than the utter joke they had in the Galaxy S9... That was a fucking disaster... I'm hoping it actually performs well in REAL WORLD cases this time, not just mostly meaningless benchmarks, but i doubt it. Samsung reminds me of when desktop PC GPU makers would cheat in benchmarks by using driver hacks.
serendip - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
It looks like Qualcomm is having an Intel-like moment where performance stops having meaningful increases year-on-year. For me, an SD835 device is more than fast enough and an 855 only makes sense for higher-performing larger devices like Windows tablets.Time to focus on the software then... my old SD650 device got a new lease on life with a clean build of Lineage on Android Pie. The same slowdown that hit the laptop/PC markets could cause a crash in the smartphone market as people keep their phones for 3-4 years instead of upgrading annually.
serendip - Wednesday, January 16, 2019 - link
I doubt it. Apple seems to be the only one with a cracking chip design team. Huawei seems to be doing decent work with HiSilicon but ARM designs are still far behind.Does it matter though? Apple's latest chips are so overpowered for their phones and tablets, the performance numbers are more for bragging rights than anything else. That could change once they start using A-series chips in their laptops.
yankeeDDL - Sunday, January 20, 2019 - link
Disclaimer: I have been using a Galaxy S8 (SD835) and I don't feel the need to upgrade anytime soon, however:a) Having more power is always nice, and there are times where the phone ... stutters, especially when moving from "heavy" games.
b) The gap with the iphones is embarrassing, and I don't see any technical justification. Yes, the iPhones are optimized all around (HW+SW) thanks to their closed ecosystem, but nearly 2x gap on the GPU is a deliberate choice which should be, at the very least justified.
We need competition in the mobile CPU/GPU, or Qualcomm will quickly become the Intel of mobile, sitting on his a** until something better comes along.
cha0z_ - Monday, January 21, 2019 - link
Dunno why Andrei is so kind in his wording about the new snapdragon. For start it's nothing that more powerful vs the kirin 980 (while it was shaped to literally obliterate it in both CPU/GPU, especially the GPU). Also even the A11 is making a joke of it and the A12 sustained performance is higher than the sd855 peak in GPU... and CPU is also for the A12 and even A11.I would kinda understand for the sd855 to lack behind the A12 with 15% in CPU/GPU, will accept somewhat to lose to the A12 even with more, but losing to the A11 is roflmao funny. How in the world you can call it success when qualcomm(as a leader in that regard) can't catch up with apple for years? Recently even the GPU started to lag behind BIG time, before atleast that was on par. Well.. cool.
mfaisalkemal - Sunday, January 20, 2019 - link
Hi Andrei, what do you think about 3 benchmark on https://www.asteroidsbenchmarks.com ?all of them include metal and vulkan api benchmark so we can comparing iOS and Vulkan mobile.
The benchmark include off screen test.
DontTreadOnMe - Thursday, January 24, 2019 - link
Does this A76 CPU support the pointer authentication codes that Apple have had since iPhone X? It seems like this is a potentially very useful security feature that it would be nice to see on Android devices.Uol - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
thank you <a href="https://www.wikipedia.org/">site</a>Nystiael - Thursday, February 7, 2019 - link
Very nice. I will but it by I don't have the money atm.Greetings
https://showbox-apk.mobi