AnTuTu, one of the most popular benchmarking apps, has released their report on the Top 10 Performance Smartphone Chips. This report comes at a time where we are seeing the newest generations of major chips battle it out in top tier flagships as well as down the line.

Before starting off, the report notes that the data used is based on average scores and not the “highest” score. This does imply that the scores that you may get on your device may fluctuate from the quoted score. Even with recurring tests, you may see fluctuations which do not follow a pattern, which the report mentions is a normal phenomenon as a degree of fluctuation is expected.

Starting off with the Overall Performance, AnTuTu ranks the latest chips in the following order...





Top spot on the table has gone to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, a chip that you will find in almost all major flagships of early 2016, and the ranking gives good basis to this decision. The Snapdragon 820 (Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, LG G5, Mi 5, Xperia X Performance) ranks above even the Apple A9 and Samsung’s Exynos 8890 (Galaxy S7, S7 Edge) by a narrow margin, and leaves behind the Kirin 950 (Huawei Mate and the Exynos 7420 (Galaxy S6 and the Note 5). The Snapdragon 810 (HTC One M9, Nexus 6P) and the mid ranged 652 fall down much below, coming close to half the top scores.

The top of the table is not as surprising as the bottom, where the mid ranged Snapdragon 650 (Redmi Note 3) and 652 (Galaxy A9) rank quite a bit above the Snapdragon 808 (LG G4, Nexus 5X). Even when compared to the Snapdragon 810, the flagship chip from Qualcomm last year, the scores do not have as wide a gap. The implication for this is that mid ranged devices in 2016 will give you performance close to what you could expect from last years flagship (on AnTuTu’s metric, at least), and you still get another two years of support (hopefully).

Noticeably missing from the list is any MediaTek chipset, but this is not because they can’t perform. The report notes the reason for their absence to be the lack of any MediaTek MT 6797 phone in the market currently. The MT6797 aka the Helio X20 is the deca-monster from MediaTek, created on 20nm process, which was announced quite a while ago but has yet to reach the consumer market.

Next up is the GPU performance on the devices:



On the face of it, the lead that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 (Adreno 530) has over the competition is astounding in this case. Both the Apple A9 (PowerVR GT7600) and the Exynos 8890 (Mali-T880 MP12) trail behind significantly from the top. But one thing to remember is that GPU performance has a direct correlation to the screen resolution. Higher the resolution, worse will be the GPU performance (i.e. more powerful GPU’s will be needed to keep things at the same level of smoothness). Since the results are an average of the processor scores and not simply of one phone versus another, we can not separate the GPU-screen resolution correlation from on-screen tests.

On the mid end, the Snapdragon 652 (Adreno 510) stands neck-to-neck with the Snapdragon 808 (Adreno 418), which is kind of expected since the SD-808 was criticized often for its degradation in GPU.

AnTuTu’s report gives a different angle for comparison of the current popular chipset in the market. But these do display a very limited part of what makes a good smartphone. These numbers do not account for other factors such as screen resolution, screen size, thermal dissipation of the device, amount of RAM available as well as the other myriad features which we take for granted. As such, they should be taken only for their face value, and not as declaration of the ultimate and supreme winner amongst SoC’s. Even some of the mid end MediaTek CPU’s deliver general performance which the uninformed public may not be able to differentiate from the flagship experience.

For now, if numbers alone are what make you tick, you will not go wrong with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820.

http://www.xda-developers.com/antutu-releases-report-on-current-top-10-smartphone-socs/

Im impressed with Huawei's Kirin SOC in the chip performance segment..... Snapdragon 820 is guns blazing ..... i guess the criticism the company recieved over the overheating issues of the 810 made the company go back to the drawing board.. Exynos