Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 Appears On Geekbench With Adreno 730 GPU

Qualcomm is expected to unveil its next-gen flagship smartphone SoC in a few months from now. The successor to the current Snapdragon 888/888+ could arrive as the Snapdragon 898 (part number SM8450) before the end of this year. We’ve been hearing about this chipset for some time now. Today, we have its first benchmark scores.

The purported Snapdragon 898 has appeared on Geekbench on an unnamed Vivo phone with the model number V2102A. The device appears to be a prototype as the model number doesn’t match any existing device from the Chinese company. Also, it has its CPU cores clocked at much slower speeds than what we are expecting.

The upcoming Qualcomm flagship processor is apparently codenamed “Taro” and it features a triple cluster CPU core arrangement. The prime core is clocked at 2.42Gz, while the three middle cores operated at 2.17GHz and the four power-efficient cores at 1.79GHz. It features the Adreno 730 GPU.

The said Vivo V2102A features 8GB of RAM and runs Android 12. The device scored 720 points on the single-core test and 1919 points on multi-core Geekbench tests.

Don’t read too much into these Snapdragon 898 Geekbench numbers

Now, at the first glance at these Geekbench numbers, the Snapdragon 898 doesn’t appear to be much impressive. However, it’s advisable to not read too much into these numbers. The single-core and multi-core scores are lower than that of the Snapdragon 888, and so are the clock speeds. Perhaps the Snapdragon 898 is still in its early testing phase and the numbers will change drastically once the end product arrives.

We already know that the new Qualcomm chip will use the ARM Cortex-X2 Super Core which can go as high as 3.09GHz. ARM promises the new CPU core to bring up to a 16 percent performance boost over Cortex-X1. The latter is found inside the Snapdragon 888 and 888+ and tops up at 2.84GHz and 3.0GHz respectively. There’s no reason why Qualcomm will throttle CPU frequency to a maximum of 2.42Gz on the upcoming chipset.

The Snapdragon 898 will also likely use the newer Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 V9 cores from ARM for its middle and low-power cores respectively. These are said to be about 30 percent more power-efficient. The new chip will also use a 4nm process node, so that’s another major upgrade. Samsung and TSMC will reportedly split the production of the next-gen Qualcomm SoC, with the former getting the vanilla 898 with the latter will manufacture the Snapdragon 898+. You can expect to hear more about this chipset in the coming weeks.