Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 shows up on Geekbench for the first time

Twitter leaker Abhishek Yadav has stumbled upon what could be the Snapdragon 898's first-ever showing on Geekbench. Interestingly enough, it seems to be running alongside a yet-to-be-announced Vivo smartphone of all devices. We usually see Qualcomm debut its high-end hardware alongside Xiaomi smartphones. Several reports have already prophesized that the upcoming Mi 12 series will be the first to run the Snapdragon 898. The listing also tells us that Qualcomm's upcoming flagship SoC will be codenamed 'Taro'.

This particular Geekbench instance, however, doesn't tell us much about the chipset's performance, as the single and multi-core scores of 720 and 1,919 are significantly lower than its predecessor. A leak from earlier told us that the Snapdragon 898 would be up to 20% faster than the Snapdragon 888, which isn't reflected in the above results. The abysmal performance could be due to it being an engineering sample and the smartphone running unstable firmware. Alternatively, the test could have been run with battery-saving mode enabled, which usually throttles the CPU heavily. Bad thermals could be at play here, too. One could also pin the blame on Samsung's 4nm node, which the chipset will apparently use.

We also get to know about the Snapdragon 898's core configuration. It seems that the 'prime' Cortex X2 core will be clocked at 2.42GHz. While not named explicitly, the Cortex-A710 core and Cortex-A510 cores are clocked at 2.17GHz and 1.79GHz, respectively. These numbers further prove that the Snapdragon 898 sample in question isn't running at its maximum potential. We found out earlier that the Cortex X2 core, in particular, can go as high as 3.09GHz. To put things in perspective, the Snapdragon 888's Cortex X1, Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 cores were clocked at 2.7GHz, 2.4GHz and 1.7GHz, respectively. Lastly, the listing also confirms that the new Qualcomm SoC will run an Adreno 730 GPU.

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