The Snapdragon 865 Performance Preview: Setting the Stage for Flagship Android 2020
by Andrei Frumusanu on December 16, 2019 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Qualcomm
- Smartphones
- 5G
- Cortex A77
- Snapdragon 865
Final Thoughts
Today’s preview focused solely on the performance metrics of the new chipset, which only cover a very small subset of the new features that the chip will be bringing to devices next year. A lot of the talking-points of the new SoC such as 5G connectivity, or the new camera and media capabilities, are aspects for which we’ll have to wait on commercial devices.
For what we’ve been able to test today, the Snapdragon 865 seems very solid. The new Cortex-A77 CPU does bring larger IPC improvements to the table, and thanks to the Snapdragon 865’s improved memory subsystem, the chip has been able to showcase healthy performance increases. I did find it odd that the web benchmarks didn’t quite perform as well as I had expected – I don’t know if the new microarchitecture just doesn’t improve these workloads as much, or if it might have been a software issue on the QRD865 phone; we’ll have to wait for commercial devices to have a clearer picture of the situation. System performance of the new chip certainly shouldn’t be disappointing, and even on a conservative baseline configuration, 2020 flagships should see an increase in responsiveness compared to the Snapdragon 855.
AI performance of the new chip is also improved – although our limited benchmark suite here isn’t able to fully expose the hardware improvements that the S865 brings with it. It’s likely that first-party camera applications will be the first real workloads that will be able to showcase the new capabilities of the chip.
On the GPU side, the improvements are also quite solid, but I just have a feeling that the narrative here isn’t quite the same anymore for Qualcomm, as Apple’s the elephant in the room now here as well. During the launch of the chipset the company was quite eager to promote that its sustained performance is better than the competition. While we weren’t able to test this aspect of the Snapdragon 865 on the QRD865 due to time constraints, the simple fact is that the chip’s peak performance remains inferior to Apple’s sustained performance, with the fruit company essentially dominating an area where previously Qualcomm was king. In this regard, I hope Qualcomm is able to catch up in the future, as the differences here are seemingly getting bigger each year.
Overall, the Snapdragon 865 seems like a very well-balanced chip and I have no doubt it’ll serve as a very competitive foundation for 2020 flagships. Qualcomm’s strengths lie in the fact that they’re able to deliver a complete solution with 5G connectivity – we do however hope that in the future the company will be able to offer more solid performance upgrades; the competition out there is getting tough.
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gagegfg - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Qualcomm works for Android, so Apple's competition doesn't generate much trouble, just embarrassment. It seems that the second does not motivate them much haha.Drumsticks - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
This comment might be too late to be seen, but is there any chance we can see the power use for the Zen 2/SKL (ICL?) based devices on the spec charts as well? It might be off by a lot, but I'm curious how they compare to the mobile SoCs. If they're too high because they're desktop chips intended for higher TDPs where maximum efficiency isn't needed, maybe it's worth it to throw in an Icelake-U number as well as a Zen 2 mobile chip when they come in.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
We never measured it accurately, the corresponding platform power for those desktop chips is generally going to be in the 30-40W range or even higher. The laptop platforms are also going to be in the 10-15W range.Drumsticks - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Fair enough; thanks for the reply! There is an awful lot more platform related stuff that isn't optimized on DT, I kind of derped on that.Thanks for your work on the article, too. I really enjoy your writeups and sympathize with the author who stays as engaged as you do with *every* commenter.
TEAMSWITCHER - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
The ads on this site are obnoxious.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
-Not using an adblocker in 2019....GH-CC - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
I'm not engineer, not much knowlege but one part in this article really concerns me:"Generally, we’ve noted that there’s a discrepancy factor of roughly 3x. We’ve reached out to Qualcomm and they confirmed in a very quick testing that there’s a discrepancy of >2.5x. Furthermore, the QRD865 phones this year again suffered from excessive idle power figures of >1.3W."
Does this mean compared to SD855, SD865 consume more power when idling?
Also, was this test conducted with internet connection or not?
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
The above quote is only valid for the QRD865; similar thing happened to the QRD855 test devices. It's not a concern for final commercial devices, so nothing to worry about.assyn - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Seems like Apple is basically untouchable.Evben an old A11 humiliating the top Android soc..:D
joms_us - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Humiliating by what? Some imaginary worthless bloated benchmark scores from a primitive tool that doesn't translate to real-world? For the last 2 years Apple is the one catching up in any side-by-side comparisons out there.