Lately, the hype train has been surrounding the Snapdragon 820, on its way out of San Diego. Which is understandable, as the Snapdragon 810 has been available most of this year, and hasn’t performed as well as Qualcomm had hoped, with the next version on its way into our hands. And they are hoping to get back on track with the Snapdragon 820 when that is released early next year. Currently the new chip is in testing with a variety of manufacturers, for their upcoming flagship devices. Most notably Samsung, who had decided to steer clear of the Snapdragon 810 this year in favor of their Exynso 7420 chipset. Qualcomm have been releasing new blog posts touting some of the features of the new Snapdragon 820, including Smart Protect earlier this week. And now it appears that the Snapdragon 820 has been benchmarked.
In 2015, we saw some crazy powerful processors hit the market. The Exynos 7420 chip from Samsung hit some crazy numbers on AnTuTu, but that is nothing compared to what the Snapdragon 820 hit. In the device that was benchmarked with the Snapdragon 820, we had a 1080p display, 64GB of storage, 4GB of RAM and a 16MP camera. The device scored 83,774. That’s a pretty high score. Now we’ve seen scores in the upper 60-thousands and a few break 70-thousand. But never past 80-thousand. That’s a pretty crazy score. Within this hype, it’s also important to remember that benchmark scores do not equal real world performance. As we’ve found out in recent years, benchmarking apps get treated differently by processors. The cores will ramp up to get a higher score. And software optimization always contributes to a decent experience in day-to-day usage.
Once we get to CES in the first week of 2016, we should see the Snapdragon 820 make its way into a variety of devices, with more coming out around MWC in early March. We’ll be interested to see if the Snapdragon 820 does still have the same heat issues as the Snapdragon 810 had. Hopefully it’ll put Qualcomm back on the right track, but with their trouble in 2015, its opened the door for competitors like MediaTek, and even Samsung’s Exynos processors to gain more customers.