Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Reference Device Benchmarks

Snapdragon 888 Benchmarks Show Next-Gen Android Phones Will Be Powerful

Qualcomm shared some performance benchmarks on their new premium Snapdragon 888 5G Mobile Platform this morning that are certainly worth taking a look at. The global pandemic made hands-on benchmarking extremely tough, so Qualcomm ran some benchmarks that they picked out and shared the results with the media. What was nice of them is that they shared a video with us that shows they ran benchmarks three times. They then took the average of those three scores as a result for the formal press release that was sent out today.

All the testing was performed on the Snapdragon 888 5G Mobile Platform reference device that is listed as QRD 8350-DVT2.1 MCN-65-PP484-211C. This device has a 6.65-inch Full HD (1080×2340, 120FPS) display, 12GB of LPDDR5 for RAM, a 512GB UFS storage drive, and a 3780mAH battery.

Commercial devices based on Snapdragon 888 are expected to be available in Q1 2021, so this is an early look at the level of performance that is set to come. Benchmark results will likely vary between the Snapdragon 888 reference design and the phones their customers bring to market, but this is a good look at general performance.

We took screen captures of all the results from the video and shared them below with the average for each test. The results look great!

For example, in Geekbench 5.0.2 the Snapdragon 865 reference platform scored around 930 points on single-core and 3465 points on multi-core when Legit Reviews was doing the testing. Qualcomm shows the Snapdragon 888 reference platform is scoring 1135 points single-core and 3794 on the multi-core test. This is an improvement of around 22% and 10%, respectively. The Qualcomm Kryo 680 generates up to a 25% uplift in overall CPU performance compared to the previous generation and we are seeing big gains like that with the numbers that they shared!

ANTUTU Benchmark v8.3.4: 735,439 points

Geekbench v5.0.2: single-core score of 1135 & multi-core score of 3794

GFX Bench v5.0 1080p Manhattan Offscreen 3.0: 169 FPS

GFX Bench v5.0 1080p Aztec Ruins Vulkan 3.0: 86 FPS

AIMark (Ludashi) 2.12: 217223

Procyon AI v1.0.56: 32288

These benchmark scores from the Snapdragon 888 refence design device look to be really promising! Performance might even be better on the OEM designs after they optimize the cooling and clock speeds for their new devices. The Qualcomm Kryo 680 in the reference device was running up to 2.84GHz.

The new smartphones with these chips will be coming in Q1 2021 with some rumored to be arriving in January. That means we are really close to having this level of performance in the wild! Qualcomm’s move to the 5nm manufacturing process came at a great time as Apple’s A14 Bionic chip in iPhone 12 models is also built on 5nm and needed some competition!