Smartphone SoC: Not every Snapdragon 855 is consistently fast

Qualcomm's latest high-end SoC Snapdragon 855 has recently been shown to have a consistently high performance in two smartphone tests, which can be permanently accessed. That suggests that smartphones with Snapdragon 855 always perform so well. A third model tested now shows a different behavior.

For the first time, ComputerBase was able to put the Snapdragon 855 under scrutiny in the OnePlus 7 Pro (test), due to lack of time spent on a Qualcomm benchmarking event for CES in January. In any case, the SoC could only have been tested in a Qualcomm reference unit.

OnePlus 7 Pro with consistently high performance

Particularly pleasing for the OnePlus 7 Pro was the constantly available power of the SoC. In several runs of the graphic benchmark GFXBench in the variant Manhattan 3.1 with the off-screen resolution 1080p, the smartphone did not lose a single FPS over the entire time. With consistently 71 FPS, the OnePlus 7 Pro delivered a very different picture than the previously tested Galaxy S10 series from Samsung, which lost power from the fourth pass. Also in the CPU measurements kept the OnePlus 7 Pro constantly high performance.

ZenFone 6 makes it equal to OnePlus

What initially looked like one-off results, as OnePlus explicitly labeled the smartphone with a “ten-layer liquid cooling system“, Which should ensure a consistently high performance, should repeat itself earlier this week in the test of the Asus ZenFone 6. Although the Asus smartphone does not quite match the values ​​of the OnePlus 7 Pro in individual benchmarks, the performance is equally constant at a high level without throttling. And that, although Asus does not emphasize the cooling system in a special way in the marketing of the smartphone.

This left the editors in – admittedly cautious euphoria – initially suspect that in smartphones with Snapdragon 855 generally consistently high performance can be expected. The SoC was designed with this goal in mind, for example, in terms of Qualcomm GPU, as more execution units to a lower clock than the predecessor Snapdragon 845 meet. That's very important for the good results in the OnePlus 7 Pro and ZenFone 6.

Sony Xperia 1 with Snapdragon 855 behaves differently

For all smartphones, however, this statement does not apply, as the Sony Xperia 1 (Hands-On) is the third smartphone to be tested with the Snapdragon 855. ComputerBase will publish a detailed review of the Xperia 1 in the coming weeks. Already today, there is a first impression of the SoC in Sony's smartphone.

In the GPU benchmark, the performance up to the third run is at the level of the OnePlus 7 Pro and ZenFone 6. Subsequently, the measured FPS reduce from run to run, until the end at 55 FPS the level of the Galaxy S10 series with Exynos 9820 is reached. That's 77 percent of the first-pass performance. The CPU benchmarks show a similar picture, where performance can be maintained until the third pass. In the single-core test, 83 percent of the original performance is final, in the multi-core test it is 90 percent.

According to the initial euphoria, the Snapdragon 855 also has clear differences in how long a smartphone can keep its performance under continuous load.