Rumors of a mysterious Xiaomi device with the phantom Snapdragon 632 allude to vaporware

A few months ago, there were reports of a mysterious Xiaomi device—said to be the Redmi Note 5 at the time—that was powered by a Snapdragon 632. Rumors of a Xiaomi device with that SoC has resurfaced. We were leery then, we still are—and rightfully so.

Over the past few months, we've seen the Snapdragon 636 announced, and featured on the Redmi Note 5 Pro, and a slew of substantial reports about the Snapdragon 640 and 670, both of which appear to have been rebranded to become members of the Snapdragon 700 series. There has, however, been no word of anything like a Snapdragon 632.

There's also the fact that the source of the information, a Geekbench listing, makes just about no sense. The listing shows the device recording a single-core score of 1155, and a multi-core score of 2738. For some perspective, that's about 30% better than the Snapdragon 630's single-core score but 40% lower than its multi-core score. It's also listed as a hexa-core SoC, which is rather unlikely. 

Geekbench listings are ridiculously easy to game, in any case, and even if we aren't looking such a scenario, there's a high chance the device listed is just one of many that will never actually make it out of development.