Details of the Snapdragon 8150 leak - How does it compare with the Kirin 980?

The Snapdragon 8150 has been confirmed for a December 4 launch but while that may be less than two weeks away, we’re only just getting our first close look at the SoC. For those not in the know, the Snapdragon 8150 is a direct successor to the current-gen Snapdragon 845, and will be used on most major flagships next year.

Going by the source, the Snapdragon 8150 will feature three sets of cores, about expected at this point, considering the Kirin 980 and the Exynos 9820 both opt for the tri-cluster route. The first set will be three Kryo Gold cores with a maximum clock speed of 2.419 GHz and 256 KB of L2 cache per core. While we’re not sure what Qualcomm’s Kryo naming scheme means for this generation, we believe the three cores here to be standard Cortex-A76 cores.

The second cluster comprises of a lone Kryo Gold prime core with a maximum clock speed of 2.842 GHz and 512 KB of L2 cache. By all indications, we could be dealing with a modified Cortex-A76 core here, and the significantly higher clock speed alludes to it being a performance core.

The last core cluster is a quad low power Kryo Silver core set, which comprises of four cores—almost definitely Cortex-A55 cores—with a maximum clock speed of 1.786 GHz and 128 KB of L2 cache per core. 

When compared to the very similar Kirin 980, it’s a bit hard to predict what performance will be. The Kirin 980 features a tri-cluster setup too, albeit with two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.6 GHz, two medium-performance Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 1.92 GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz. 

By those numbers, we would expect the Snapdragon 8150 to be about par with the Kirin 980 in multi-core performance. In the single-core department, though, the Snapdragon 8150 will likely outperform the Kirin 980—and by quite a distance too—due to its lone Cortex-A76 core clocked at 2.842 GHz. It’ll also be interesting to see how the cache memory, especially of the Cortex-A55 cores, affects real-life performance (the Kirin 980’s Cortex-A55 cores have twice the L2 cache memory of the Snapdragon 8150’s).

Of course, we’ll have to wait until both SoCs are released and tested for more concrete numbers.