Qualcomm’s as-yet-unannounced Snapdragon 855 SoC appears to have now shown up in an unknown Xiaomi device via Geekbench. The listing and associated scores, generated on July 27, are uploaded under the title ‘Xiaomi SDM855 for arm64’ indicating that the SoC is in use. However, the numbers associated with the handset don’t seem to line up at all with that chipset. That’s because the Snapdragon 855 is flagship hardware, rumored to be built on Samsung’s 7nm process for better efficiency and performance. It also isn’t expected to be launched until sometime this fall but despite those expectations, the scores are much lower than the current silicon on offer. In fact, they are closer to last generation’s premium chipset – namely, the Snapdragon 835 which is found in smartphones such as the HTC U11. The current generation Snapdragon 845, as utilized in Samsung’s Galaxy S9 Plus, has a single and multi-core score of 2,243 and 8,098 respectively. By comparison, the device purportedly sporting the upcoming SoC only manages 1,784 and 6,359.
The other specs covered by the benchmark also seem to line up with that older component. It’s a single octa-core SoC, clocked at 1.90 GHz. More bothersome still is the chipset identifier, which matches up with the above-mentioned Snapdragon 835. Specifically, that’s identified as “ARM implementer 81 architecture 8 variant 10 part 2048 revision 1” while the motherboard is also suspect since the same msm8998 board was used with the Snapdragon 835. It is entirely possible that the listing’s title is deliberately misleading. The corresponding figures may have been tampered with in order to keep the still-unannounced hardware under wraps or could be wholly accurate.
Meanwhile, the other listed specs seem to line up with the manufacturer’s Xiaomi Mi Mix 2. More directly, aside from its apparent use of the Snapdragon 835 SoC, the handset appears to ship with 6GB of RAM and Android 8.1 Oreo on board. Bearing that in mind, the scores are slightly different from previous Xiaomi devices that shipped with the hardware in question. That doesn’t necessarily mean much since fluctuation in scores are common and depend on software being run alongside the test among other factors. So although there isn’t any way to verify for certain at this juncture, the news should be taken with a dose of skepticism for now.
