SD 865-powered OnePlus 8 Pro placed 22nd in AI-Benchmark results behind the Xiaomi Mi 10, Galaxy S20, and Oppo Find X2, Kirin 990-based phones top the chart

We are not too far from the release of the OnePlus 8 lineup, so benchmarks are likely to leak in the run-up to the official launch. One such result that is now available is AI Benchmark — a popular tool to test out AI capabilities of smartphones. While there are several factors that can influence the test results, the initial numbers put out by the OnePlus 8 Pro aren't too encouraging.

The OnePlus 8 Pro powered by the Snapdragon 865 scored 33,480 points in the AI-Benchmark test earning itself the 22nd position on the leaderboard. The OnePlus 8 Pro is ahead of the Asus ROG Phone II (33,185) but loses to the Xiaomi Mi 10 5G (33,710) by a narrow margin. What's interesting here is that the Huawei Nova 5 gets to score 34,432 points in the test despite being powered by the mid-range Kirin 810 SoC.

Even more intriguing is the fact that the Nova 5 is shown running Android 9 while the OnePlus 8 Pro is running Android 10. The OS version matters a lot when it comes to good AI performance as new AI features get introduced with each major Android update. The difference becomes especially apparent in AI Benchmark as it relies heavily on Android's NNAPI instead of custom APIs from SoC vendors such as Qualcomm's Hexagon Tensor Accelerator. 

The OnePlus 8 Pro's somewhat mediocre performance in the benchmark cannot be directly attributed to just the SD 865 SoC alone as other phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G (37,112) and the Oppo Find X2 (39,638) powered by the same chipset manage to amass high scores. We also see the Oppo Reno3 powered by the new MediaTek Dimensity 1000L (58,628) grabbing a respectable 6th position. 

Leading the scoreboard, however, are Huawei phones powered by the Kirin 990 5G such as the Honor V30 Pro 5G (76,120) and the Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G (76,206). HiSilicon's in-house Da Vinci architecture that brings big.LITTLE configuration to the NPU side of things seems to be paying rich dividends in AI tests.

That being said, it must be remembered that the OnePlus 8 Pro device being tested is not final hardware and scores are likely to improve in launch devices. Therefore, unless we test the final unit, we can only speculate as to why the OnePlus 8 Pro's AI scores are lower than the competition even with the same chipset.