First Impressions & Conclusion

2020 had been a quite successful year for the Snapdragon 765 and it had seen usage in a lot of devices, some of which we reviewed or covered:

The commonality between all of them was that while they promised the same features as the flagship counterparts that year, with a specific focus on 5G connectivity, the performance reminded us more of flagship devices of several generations ago. Sometimes I would wonder if it’s not actually better to purchase an older flagship device as in many cases the experience would have possibly ended up being better.

The new Snapdragon 780 goes a long way to resolve such performance discrepancies and bridging the gap to the current flagship generation. The performance uplifts to the Snapdragon 765G are quite massive, both in CPU and in particular GPU, resulting in a new end-user experience that is much different and much improved compared to the last generation.

Qualcomm also managed to achieve the performance uplifts all while improving energy efficiency, which is sometimes a hard balance to achieve when making big leaps like these.

We’ll be focusing on a review of the Mi 11 Lite 5G at a later date, but the device is a perfect example of what can be achieved with a Snapdragon 780G. At 369€ MSRP, the phone’s performance positions itself extremely competitively in terms of value proposition against flagship SoC devices, besides it being a breath of fresh air in terms of device design and form-factor.

In general, the Snapdragon 780 is a big leap forward for this device segment, much improving the device experiences you can expect from a “high mid-range” or “premium” range device, and should prove itself a solid foundation for many other 2021 devices.

Related Reading:

GPU Performance & Power
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  • XacTactX - Tuesday, April 13, 2021 - link

    Andrei, it's hard for me to understand the performance of the 780G with the benchmarks that are posted. Any chance you could run Geekbench 5, or AnTuTu 8, or PCMark for Android?
  • Fulljack - Tuesday, April 13, 2021 - link

    finally, a good midrange SoC with only drawbacks are GPU performance compared to current flagship.

    hopefully it'll come to Asia in sub-300$ market. and by Asia I mean Asia outside of China.
  • eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link

    I have the sneaky suspicion that they limited the memory bus vs. the 888 so that this (780) doesn't come too close.
  • KarlKastor - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link

    Well, this is likely that limited for cost saving. If you don't want to get it too close, spare 2 cores or make the GPU smaller. Or just reduce frequency for higher efficency.
  • Alien959 - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link

    I am not technically inclined in mobile SoC, but 2x 16b memory interface is little narrow for something that is pushing at least full HD resolution. Can the GPU reach full performance with such narrow interface?
  • zodiacfml - Wednesday, April 14, 2021 - link

    i Would be interested to see this in a Poco. THe Poco F3 with a Snapdragon 870/865 is cheaper than this M11.
  • EthiaW - Thursday, April 15, 2021 - link

    Cheer up mediatek! Give us better snapdragons please!
  • Silver5urfer - Thursday, April 15, 2021 - link

    No Sony press release ? They are launching solid smartphone lineup. The 10 Mark 3 looks like the best budget phone on the market.
  • Sharma_Ji - Sunday, April 25, 2021 - link

    The what ???
  • Linustechtips12#6900xt - Friday, April 16, 2021 - link

    I wonder if media tech is actually going to make a return besides under 100$ phones apparently there new socs are actually around 865/865+ levels

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