Xperia fans should reach for a pinch of salt immediately as a solitary supposed Geekbench 5 listing for the Sony Xperia 1 III has already popped up on Reddit. The record is for a Sony XQ-AC52 device, which is a model number that has previously been associated with the Xperia 1 III. As is well known, Geekbench records can easily be doctored, and this particular listing is currently not available via the public benchmark browser. Moving on to the results, it seems this Snapdragon 888-powered smartphone breezed through the tests with ease, coming up with a single-core score of 1,129 points and a multi-core score of 3,708 points.
It’s worth keeping in mind that these scores are currently theoretically maximum results, so comparing them with the average scores of smartphones in the Geekbench charts is a little unfair. Even so, the supposed Xperia 1 III here manages to outscore fellow SD888 phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S21+ (+11.78% for the Sony phone) and Galaxy S21 (+20.11%) in the single-core benchmark. A browse through the site's Galaxy S21 results additionally indicates that this alleged Sony Xperia 1 III could outpace the majority of its opponents. There’s a similar situation in the multi-core arena, where the Xperia’s score of 3,708 points takes out the powerful Asus ROG Phone 3 chart leader by +14.30%.
As for comparing the Xperia 1 III against the Xperia 1 II, there is an impressive leap between iterations: +39.90% single-core gains and +33% multi-core gains. There are plenty of caveats that should be applied here: The listing could certainly be fake; it’s comparing a potential high score against average scores; the Geekbench Android charts are not exhaustive. However, if the Geekbench 5 record is genuine then it offers a good idea of what a performance powerhouse the Sony Xperia 1 III is, and it will be interesting to see what kind of average scores it accumulates once more samples have been tested and results collated.
Source(s)
Reddit via AndroidNext (in Japanese) & Geekbench