Most of this year, there’s been talk about the Snapdragon 810 and how it overheats and how the Snapdragon 820 will fix all those problems. While we don’t know for sure that the Snapdragon 820 will be much better than its predecessor – mostly because we haven’t seen a device with the Snapdragon 820 inside it yet – we have seen some benchmarks from the processor. There was a set of benchmarks that hit GeekBench this week with the processor MSM8996, which is supposedly the Snapdragon 820. The Single-Core results beat out the Exynos 7420 which is what Samsung is using in their Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, it also beat out the Snapdragon 810 in the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro, which we kind of expected, seeing as the Snapdragon 820 is replacing the Snapdragon 810.
The Snapdragon 820 is built on Samsung’s 14nm process, so we shouldn’t have the heat issues that were present with the Snapdragon 810 this year. Another benchmark for the MS8996 showed up today on GeekBench and shows that the processor is a quad-core 64-bit SoC, and the cores were clocked a bit lower than the max which is 3GHz. In this benchmark they showed up at about 1.46GHz. Which meant the benchmark scores weren’t that impressive, which is understandable seeing as the processor was clocked a lot slower than normal.
Qualcomm teased the Snapdragon 820 at Mobile World Congress back in March. We haven’t heard much about it so far, but we do know that the company is planning to start sampling the Snapdragon 820 to customers in the second half of this year. Which normally means we’ll see it make its way into smartphones around CES or MWC next year. As there is usually a six month gap between sampling and manufacturing. Seeing as OEMs do need to test this processor and make sure they want to use it, and not opt for MediaTek’s Helio X20, or even a new Exynos chip from Samsung. But so far the Snapdragon 820 is looking promising, Hopefully we don’t have a repeat of what happened with the Snapdragon 810 though. You can check out the benchmark scores from the source links below.