One thing in common among all the flagship smartphones that will be announced at the Mobile World Congress in Spain later this month is that they will all be equipped with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon chipset.
Unlike last year's flop with the Snapdragon 810 chip and its overheating issues, it seems Qualcomm is making up for it this year with fantastic benchmark numbers backing its latest Snapdragon 820.
A lot is riding on Qualcomm's newest chipset, but things are already looking good now that the Snapdragon is back in the good graces of Samsung. Reports say the South Korean electronics company not only helped develop the chip with its 14nm FinFET process technology, it's also powering the Galaxy S7 with the 820.
Power is one thing the Snapdragon 820 is certainly packing. In the latest benchmark tests for the device, the results reveal that the chipset bests Apple's current A9 chip found inside the iPhone 6S Plus. Against the current market monster, the Tegra X1, the 820 holds up well on its own, going head-to-head against its toughest competition.
Packaged into the Snapdragon 820 chipset is an Adreno 520 graphics chip along with two 2.1 GHz and two 1.6 GHz Kryo cores to round out the 820's quad-core design. All of that tech together allows Qualcomm's latest chip to also match Google's Pixel C tablet. However, it's not all rosy results for Qualcomm's latest offering.
In a more advanced benchmark test known as the Manhattan 3.1, the Snapdragon 820 could not overtake the Tegra X1. Then again, the Tegra X1 does power a full-sized tablet. With that aside, the 820's performance outshines that of chipsets currently found in today's flagship smartphones, earning a score that's nearly double that of the Huawei Nexus 6P and the Samsung Galaxy Note 5.
The device that was used in testing the Snapdragon 820 was a bit of a peculiarity as it's of a configuration that's not typically been seen yet in such tests. The unit was a 6.2-inch device with a 2,560 x 1,200 resolution display running Android 6.0 Marshmallow, 10 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM. To add to the 820's street cred, the test unit was able to push more pixels than the iPhone 6s Plus.
All that being said, however, benchmark scores aren't the be-all and end-all measurements of real-world usage. A pairing with bloated TouchWiz software could pare down the chipset's benchmark numbers, for example. At best, the scores are interesting enough to read and a face-off between different devices is fun enough. We'll see what the Snapdragon 820 is really like when we see it in devices by the end of the month.
