World’s first SD855 smartphone benchmarks kill the competition

When Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 855 last month, they promised that the new 7nm chip would be significantly more powerful than the Snapdragon 845 and would also give Huawei’s Kirin 980 and Apple A12 a run for their money. While it’s easy to get excited about claims like that, we’ve been waiting for some real-world numbers to back them up.

Thanks to today’s unveiling of the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, we can now get a better look at howmuch more powerful Qualcomm’s new chip actually is.

During the Z Pro GT’s unveiling, Lenovo shared some numbers, revealing that the phone managed to score a mind-boggling 368,480 points onAntutu. When compared to the Antutu benchmark numbers of the iPhone XS, the Lenovo Z Pro GT has a 3-5% performance advantage. But that gap grows to 20% when matched up against devices running the Kirin 980 and there’s an astounding 25% gap when you look at devices running the Snapdragon 845.

To be fair, the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT’s Antutu benchmark numbers area little skewed since the benchmarked device was equipped with 12GB of RAM. By removing the RAM “advantage” that the phone has over its competitors, Antutubelieves that the phone would still manage a score in the 360,000 point range. Even with this drop, the Lenovo Z5 Pro GT is still the most powerful smartphone to be benchmarked by Antutu and should give us a good baseline for how other Android smartphones running the Snapdragon 855 should perform. For those who don’t know, a leaked Antutu benchmark score for the upcoming Samsung GalaxyS10 surfaced recently with a score of 343,051. Since the device isn’t expected to make its debut for at least two more months, those scores couldeasily reach 360,000 as the software is finalized and performance optimizationsare made.

While few of you will likely be buying the new Lenovo Z5 ProGT, the performance numbers we’re seeing from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 lookpromising. The new chipset will deliver incredibly powerful smartphones in 2019 and the new 7nm manufacturing process will also give those devices improved battery life.

What’s your take on the performance of the new Snapdragon 855? Do you think it’ll be worth upgrading from a high-end 2018 smartphone to one running a SD855 in 2019? Share your thoughts in the comments.