AnTuTu’s report of the top-performing devices for May 2017 is now live, and the iPhone 7 Plus has given up its throne to the HTC U11, which bested it by close to 6,000 points. iPhones typically feature powerful hardware that can hang with and surpass the best Android flagships, and this year’s iPhone 7 Plus packed horsepower that nobody in the Android crowd had been able to best until now. The vanilla iPhone 7, on the other hand, was beaten out by both versions of the Samsung Galaxy S8, as well as Xiaomi’s Mi6. The four phones that mingled with Apple’s entries in the charts all sport a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, though the ranking is a bit unclear on which processor the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus are sporting; the score for those two handsets may well be a cumulative average of the Exynos 8895 and Snapdragon 835 variants.
The HTC U11 managed to best the two Apple phones mainly in single-core testing and UX processing. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is a very powerful chip, but the HTC U11’s dominance over other Snapdragon 835-powered flagships shows that software optimization can still make a big difference in overall performance. The iPhone’s fall on the charts is a bit of a curious development, which AnTuTu chalks up to a recent OS update. The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have the same processing package, though the iPhone 7 Plus has an extra GB of RAM over the smaller device. In any case, all of the phones that fell below the iPhone 7 on the ranking chart boast a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 or update Snapdragon 821 processor. These include the OnePlus 3T, OnePlus 3, LeEco Le Pro 3, and LeEco Le Max 2.
The Android side of the chart obviously shows the HTC U11 holding the crown, followed by the Xiaomi Mi6 and the two Galaxy S8 variants. Following those, the chart falls in the same order as the cross-platform one until positions 9 and 10, which are taken by the Snapdragon 625-packing ASUS ZenFone 3 and Snapdragon 820-powered ZTE Axon 7. The presence of the upper mid-range ASUS ZenFone 3 means that it surpassed multiple Snapdragon 820 and Snapdragon 821 toting flagships, such as the Samsung Galaxy S7 and LG G6; it stands as a testament to just how powerful Qualcomm’s mid-range chips are becoming.
