Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Benchmarks: Comparing CPU and GPU Performance with the Kirin 990, Snapdragon 855, and Snapdragon 845

Nearly two weeks ago, Qualcomm invited tech journalists to Maui for the 2019 Snapdragon Tech Summit. At the event, the company unveiled its latest high-end SoC for mobile devices: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform. Qualcomm says the new Snapdragon 865 boasts a 25% CPU performance increase and a 20% GPU performance increase over the previous generation Snapdragon 855. Also, the new SoC supports LPDDR5 memory and is manufactured on a newer 7nm process. Qualcomm’s latest silicon will make its way to 2020 flagships like the Xiaomi Mi 10, OPPO Find X2, and many other high-end smartphones.

But just how much faster is it than the previous generations? We benchmarked Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 reference device at the event to find out. We pit the new SoC against the Snapdragon 855+, the Snapdragon 855, the Snapdragon 845, and the Kirin 990 from Huawei’s HiSilicon. We would have loved to test the Snapdragon 865 against the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 or Samsung Exynos 990, but sadly, there aren’t any devices with the new MediaTek and Samsung SoCs. Once we get our hands on real devices with the Snapdragon 865, we’ll be testing the real-world performance outside of benchmarks, too.

Concluding Highlights

• For AnTuTu’s final score, we observe a large 33% bump over the 855+ and a massive improvement of around 45% over the 855. The CPU subtests showcase massive improvements, with uplifts in each subscore ranging from 15% to 97%. These results are surprising given that Qualcomm posted a respectable 25% CPU performance uplift over the Snapdragon 855, yet we see all CPU subscores go up by over 40%, and even 70%. The GPU side of the subscores, however, sees a much more restrained increase of around 13% on average, compared to the 855+, or 24% to 56% compared to our 855 scores from the Google Pixel 4.
• The popular PCMark 2.0 saw a massive jump of almost 40% in its “Work 2.0” final score, compared to the 855+. Looking at the subscores, it seems that most of the improvement lies in the Photo Editing 2.0 subtest, which nearly doubles in score, followed by a Web Browsing score improvement of around 80%. The final score is simply the average between all subscores, so these massive bumps end up being balancing out the more conservative figures of the other subscores, which remain constant or rise by less than 25%.
• Geekbench 5 subscores gave us a decent look into where the resulting ~20% increase in Single-core and Multi-core scores comes from. The crypto tests (which are weighted the least in calculating the final scores) had a performance increment of 36% and 44% (single and multi, respectively) compared to our 855+ results, whereas integer and floating-point performance only rose by about 19% to 25%, perfectly in-line with Qualcomm’s figures. The gap is much larger if we compare the 865 to our 855 results from the Pixel 4, as crypto goes up by 66% while integer and floating-point improvements sit over 50% for single-core tests and over 35% for multi-core tests. Given the 865 features the same clock speeds as the 855, we see a bump in integer and floating score performance per MHz.
• 3DMark scores also fall more-or-less in line with the expected 20% faster graphics rendering that Qualcomm boasted at the Snapdragon tech summit. The graphics and physics scores saw an increase of 15% and 11% (respectively) over the 855+ for the OpenGL ES 3.1 test, and 25% and 22% for the Vulkan test. This suggests the 865 is a healthy upgrade for gamers.
• GFXBench only saw a performance boost of 5% to 15% over the 855+, though when comparing it against the regular 855 those numbers jump above the 20% year-on-year increments posted by the company.
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