Possible Snapdragon 865 scores 19% more than the Snapdragon 855 on Geekbench; 16% more than the Snapdragon 855+ too

The Snapdragon 855 and 855 Plus currently remain in vogue, but an early version of their successor may have just appeared on Geekbench. Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 855 in December last year, the same month that it launched the Snapdragon 835 the preceding year, so realistically we are about four months away from the arrival of the next flagship Snapdragon SoC. Incidentally, the Snapdragon 855 Plus is a higher bin variant of the Snapdragon 855, so think it almost as a mid-generation refresh.

The SoC in question appeared on Geekbench as the QUALCOMM Kona for arm64 and comes with eight ARM cores that have a 1.8 GHz base clock. The chip identifies as an "ARM implementer 65 architecture 8 variant 1 part 3341 revision 0", although searches online only returned the Geekbench listing. The Snapdragon 855 can clock up to 2.84 GHz on its prime core, with Qualcomm overclocking this to 2.96 GHz for the Snapdragon 855 Plus, so expect to see their successor to reach at least 3 GHz.

The mysterious SoC scored 4,149 in the single-core portion of Geekbench 4.4 and 12,915 in the multi-core variant, making it faster than any Snapdragon 8xx chip that we have tested. Comparing it against recent Snapdragon 8xx chips in our database reveals that it is around 19% faster in single-core tasks than the average of Snapdragon 855 powered devices that we have tested, and 18% in the corresponding multi-core benchmark. We have seen the Snapdragon 855 hit 3,537 and 11,388 in Geekbench single and multi-core benchmarks, which still puts it well behind the Qualcomm Kona.

The ASUS ROG Phone 2 posted slightly higher Geekbench scores with its Snapdragon 85 Plus SoC, but the Qualcomm Kona is still scored 14% more in the single-core benchmark and 16% more in the multi-core benchmark. By contrast, the Snapdragon 855 averages around 25% better multi-core and 44% better single-core scores than the Snapdragon 845 according to our database. However, the Qualcomm Kona may well be an engineering sample, or a downclocked version of the Snapdragon 860/865, which rarely score as highly as final retail versions do. Additionally, it was paired with just 6 GB of RAM, which may skew the results slightly. In short, take the Qualcomm Kona as a taste of what is to come, and that is already handily outscoring the Snapdragon 855 even at this early stage.