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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s.yu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
There are countless shallow and useless arguments to be made from your standpoint, for example you could argue that turning system animations off "slows down" "real world experience", because without the animations filling in for the latency, "the average joe and jane" perceive "real world" lags/stutters which in reality take less time than playing the animation takes, i.e. is faster, not to mention a decrease to the load on the GPU.Sam6536 - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Where are rog phone 2 benchmarks?Not taking the most powerful android phone into consideration in this test isn't fair
joms_us - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
How the hell Apple A9 is faster than Ryzen or Skylake if A13 is pathetically slower in this comparison and not even close to double performance as show in SPEC.https://cdn57.androidauthority.net/wp-content/uplo...
Makes me think if somebody is drinking Koolaid here?
diehardmacfan - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
ahhh yes, poo-poo an industry standard benchmark like SPEC for SoC bencharking in an article about an SoC, then link to a device performance test developed by AndroidAuthority.Andrei your patience with idiots is astounding.
Nicon0s - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
@diehardmacfan What exactly is wrong with Speed Test GX 2.0? And it wasn't developed by Android Authority.The SD 865 completed a bunch of real world CPU related tasks, faster than the A13. This makes this "industry standard benchmark like SPEC" quite irrelevant for somebody interesting to buying a smartphone because in actual usage the A13 doesn't present any real performance advantage.
Also in the GPU test the SD 865 was only slightly behind even if it pushed more pixels.
If I would only be interested in buying a smartphone in order to use it to run SPEC and GFXBench Aztec Ruins off-screen benchmark all day long than the iphone 11 would be my number one pick.
For anything other than that I don't see any real and tangible performance advantage.
This Anandtech performance analysis seems disconnected from the real world experience of using such high end devices. Android sites do a better job analyzing the experience and significance of the performance of these mobile SOC and what it actually means for smartphone users. For example XDA has a realy nice benchmark where they test the overall fluidity of using certain smartphones. This both tests the OS optimizations and SOC performance.
joms_us - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
Excellent point, I am sick and tired of this propaganda to uplift an Apple product just because it shines in one or two primitive and bias benchmarking tool when thousands of other apps say otherwise.s.yu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
May I interest you in some rhino horn powder claimed by thousands of traditional Chinese witch...I mean doctors to enlarge your penis?s.yu - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
In short: Poor validity and poor reliability. There's nothing particularly useful about that test.It generates mixed, or rather obfuscated scores correlating to an unknown extent to UI design choice, certain drivers, and hardware performance.
This is somewhat metaphysics, and has no place in science.
cha0z_ - Friday, December 27, 2019 - link
That test is fun and great, but totally not representative of anything. Taking it serious is not serious. :)MetaCube - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
How are you still not banned ?