Microsoft's Surface Duo beats all of the currently available Samsung foldables in latest Geekbench tests

Microsoft is planning to roll out the Surface Duo smartphone next month, marketing it as an alternative to all the “conventional” foldables out there. While the Surface Duo is expected to pack some cool features revolving around the dual display, one thing going against it seems to be Microsoft’s decision to equip this handset with last year’s Snapdragon 855 flagship SoC from Qualcomm (not even 855 Plus). For a US$1,399 device, this might not sound like a great deal, but the latest benchmarks spotted on Geekbench show that Microsoft is doing a great job with the SoC optimization.

The Geekbench 5 database entry is for a model named “oema0 oema0 b1,” which does not sound too familiar right off the bat, but the motherboard model has “surface.duo” next to it. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 octa-core SoC appears to be running at 1.78 GHz and it is coupled with only 6 GB of RAM. Nevertheless, the Surface Duo was able to score 762 points in the single-core tests and 2,867 points in the multi-core tests.

Although the amount of RAM is quite limited, the Surface Duo beats most foldables powered by the Snapdragon 855, including Samsung’s original Galaxy Fold that scored 2,663 points in the multi-core tests, or the Galaxy Z Flip powered by the Snapdragon 855 Plus that scored 2,685 points. It also beats last year’s Galaxy Note 10+ 5G or the Exynos version of the new Galaxy Note 20 Ultra that scored 2,659 points.

Fans of the device can now rest assured that it is not running obsolete hardware, and we could even see some minor improvements with a bit more RAM and some clever OS tweaks by launch time.