Snapdragon 845 benchmarked: how does it compare to rival chips?

The Snapdragon 845 is the chip expected to power dozens of flagship smartphones, from Samsung (well, in the USA) to LG, HTC and Sony. But how much of an improvement is it over the Snapdragon 835 and rival chipsets?

Well, Qualcomm invited US media to check out the 2018 chip, with Anandtech leading the charge for benchmark testing. For starters, we see big wins in several CPU-based PCMark tests, such as photo editing (over 17 700, versus second placed Pixel 2 XL’s 12 800), performance (8358, compared to Pixel 2 XL’s 7130) and web browsing (7946 versus the second placed Mate 10 Pro’s 6908).

We do however see the Pixel 2 XL winning a video editing test, while Apple’s latest phones win the WebView test.

Moving on to the GPU-based tests, Anandtech ran the reference device through 3DMark’s Sling Shot 3.1 graphics test, beating the runner-up (iPhone X) 5834 to 4428. The device did however lose to Apple’s iPhones in the GFXBench Manhattan and T-Rex tests — but it was still the best Android chip of the lot in these tests.

The publication also goes in-depth on power efficiency tests, but the article does a good job of illustrating the chip’s performance improvements in general.

The Snapdragon 845 packs an octacore 10nm design, featuring four semi-custom Kryo 385 Gold cores (based on A75 cores) and four semi-custom Kryo 385 Silver cores (based on the new power-efficient A55 cores). By comparison, the Snapdragon 835 used a similar manufacturing process but offered semi-custom versions of ARM’s older A73 and A53 cores.