The next Qualcomm flagship SoC is still some time away, but that didn’t stop Royole from unveiling the FlexPai foldable smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 8150 on Thursday. The chipset is based on a 7nm manufacturing processor, same as the new HiSilicon Kirin 980 and the Apple 12 Bionic.
Now, benchmark results have started to pour in on the internet and by the looks of it, the new Snapdragon 8150 is definitely faster than the current flagship Snapdragon 845 as well as the Kirin 980 on the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. But it isn’t anywhere close to the Apple's A12 Bionic on the iPhone XS Max or even the new A12X Bionic on the iPad Pro.
Some reviewers managed to run Geekbench’s Single-core and Multi-core benchmark tests on the new Snapdragon chip which is why they surfaced on the benchmark’s leaderboards. The Geekbench test reveals the raw CPU performance of the chipsets and the results often corroborate to the actual performance of the device the chipset powers. Here’s how the Snapdragon 8150 compares against its peers:
Geekbench Single-core:
Apple iPad Pro 12.9 powered by A12X Bionic: 5,020
Apple iPhone XS Max powered by A12 Bionic: 4,823
Apple iPhone X powered A11 Bionic: 4,256
Huawei Mate 20 Pro powered by Kirin 980: 3,291
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150: 3,181
Google Pixel 3 XL powered by Snapdragon 845: 2,318
Geekbench Multi-core:
Apple iPad Pro 12.9 powered by A12X Bionic: 18,217
Apple iPhone XS Max powered by A12 Bionic: 11,472
Apple iPhone X powered A11 Bionic: 10,215
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8150: 10,084
Huawei Mate 20 Pro powered by Kirin 980: 9,712
Google Pixel 3 XL powered by Snapdragon 845: 8,439
As you can see, the upcoming Qualcomm 8150 is definitely faster than the Snapdragon 845, and it pips the Mate 20 Pro powered by the Kirin 980 in multi-core performance, but in single-core, Huawei takes the lead. Even more interesting is the fact that the Snapdragon 8150 is still slower than last year’s Apple A11 Bionic on the iPhone X.
The lead Apple has in terms of its chipset’s performance is clearly an indication of Apple planning on using ARM chipsets to power Mac devices, news about which, broke last year. According to MacRumors, the 2018 iPad Pro is apparently quite close to the performance of the 2018 MacBook Pro with Intel Core i7 processor with higher single-core performance.
However, it’s one thing to run iOS on an ARM chipset and running a full-fledged MacOS on it. The performance is likely to be lower than what you get on the iPad Pro because the instruction set is much different and more intense. The final results are also unclear considering this is just one benchmark. The full picture can only be seen after running a bevy of such tests.