Qualcomm officially launched its flagship SoC Snapdragon 845 at the end of 2017. At the beginning of February, we had the honor to test the engineering prototype of the Snapdragon 845 at their headquarters in San Diego for the first time through the activities organized by Qualcomm. How about its performance? How much progress has it made compared with the previous generation? Through this article, I believe you will have a more in-depth understanding of this new SoC.
1. Appearance
The engineering machine of Snapdragon 845 has a variety of forms. There will be different types of engineering machines for the development of different functional modules. This panda machine with white front and blue back is the smallest in size. Its body shape is close to the normal mobile phone, and its screen proportion is not high. A huge camera is in front of it. It uses a traditional 16:9 screen with a resolution of 2560 * 1440.
There is a huge front camera on the right side of the receiver and a Qualcomm Snapdragon sticker on the front, which is very "engineering machine".
The phone uses the virtual key on the screen, and there is a small circle below it similar to the touch home key, but pressing it does not respond.
The back is made of metal, with obvious antenna partition strip, and the logo of Qualcomm Snapdragon is pasted on the back.
Dual camera design is adopted, and there is a dual color temperature LED fill light on the right side of the camera.
The fuselage line is relatively strong, and the design of plane plus trimming is used directly at the border, which can be said to be less trimming. However, under the current stereotyped appearance design, it seems very special.
There are Type-C connectors and speakers at the bottom of the fuselage.
2. System and configuration information
Xiaolong 845 engineering machine adopts Native Android 8.0 The system, system UI and function are all in line with the "pro son" series.
Although it is an engineering machine, its functions are relatively complete. WiFi, Bluetooth, mobile network, etc. are all complete. However, when I experienced it, I found that OTG devices cannot be used. It takes a little effort to export and import data.
The model of the engineering machine is very simple and violent. It is directly "SDM845 for arm64". The security patch is relatively old. In November 2017, the kernel version was on December 26, 2017, but these are not important. The SoC of this phone is, of course Snapdragon 845 Yes, match 6G LPDDR4x Memory, 16G UFS 2.1 Flash memory. In addition, there is a small detail. In the past, the codes of Snapdragon SoC are generally APQXXXX and MSMXXXX. For example, the Snapdragon 835 is MSM8998. By the time of Snapdragon 845, it has finally become a better understood sdm845.
Snapdragon 845 adopts Samsung 10nm LPP Compared with the previous generation 10nm LPE, the process is more excellent in power consumption control. The core model is Kryo 385 The big core is 2803MHz , the small nucleus is 1766MHz The core code has changed to 0x802 and 0x803, which is obviously different from Snapdragon 835. GPU is Adreno 630 , driver version V283 , which is higher than the V269 of Xiaomi MIX2 (Android 8.0) and the V258 of Pixel 2 series (Android 8.1). The GPU frequency is the same as that of Snapdragon 835, which is 710MHz (The above figure shows errors, which will be explained below).
3. Objective score test comparison
The next objective score test is the traditional project Geekbench 4.2.1, whether it is single thread or multithreaded, Snapdragon 845 is the strongest level of all Android machines we have tested 。 among Compared with the previous generation, the single core performance has improved by about 25%, and the multi-core performance has also improved by nearly 24% , obvious improvement.
The above is the detailed score of Geekbench 4.2.1's single thread and multi-threaded tests.
In horizontal comparison, compared with the Android flagship SoC of 16 years and 17 years, Snapdragon 845 is definitely a pendant, From the perspective of single core performance, it is similar to Apple A9 Of course, the scores of different platforms are only for reference. I believe that the mobile phone using Snapdragon 845 will be much smoother than the iPhone 6s Plus. In terms of multi-core performance, Snapdragon 845 is also strong. It has been inferior to Apple A11 Bionic, which is against the sky, and it has obviously left other SoCs behind.
RAR test, which is a test of CPU performance and memory performance. Snapdragon 845's multithreading performance is very strong, Over 2900KB/s It is also the strongest of all the mobile phones we tested. Compared with the flagship of the previous generation, it has significantly improved a level. However, the single thread performance is a bit disappointing, only 600KB/s 。 When we test a single thread, we turn on frequency detection at the same time, and find that the four cores reach the highest frequency at the same time, which means that the engineering machine Only single core output performance is required, and all large cores will reach the highest frequency at the same time.
RAR multithreading performance is eye-catching, and single thread fall glasses.
Pi test tests the floating point operation performance of CPU. Snapdragon 845 also breaks our test record. This is The first set breaks for 12s The mobile phone that has completed the 10 million bit test has really powerful performance (it has been tested for many times and is around 12s, the best one is 11.742s ）。
Pi won the first place without suspense.
In the graphics score test, the usual GFXBench 4.0.13 and 3DMark Sling Shot ES3.1 tests were used. The Snapdragon 845 showed the strongest GPU performance level in the mobile phone, especially 3DMark's performance was very eye-catching, which we expected. The flagship GPU of the Adreno series will never disappoint us.
The above detection software shows that Snapdragon 845 "only" 257MHz Common sense tells us that this is impossible. When we conduct the GFXBench off screen test, we turn on the monitoring at the same time and find that the GPU frequency can reach 710MHz And we found that the GPU frequency of this machine Only 257MHz for daily use and 710MHz for output performance More gears should be added to the officially launched mobile phones.
GFXBench compared with Manhattan and Tyrannosaurus Rex scenes (off screen), the GPU of A11 Bionic has high power consumption when fully loaded, and the frame number is not very stable. Here, we compare the limit frame number at room temperature with the Snapdragon 845, and we can see that their graphics performance is very close.
In the most stressful Manhattan ES3.1 (off screen) test, the frames of the two are also five to five, so it can be inferred that their extreme performance in the game is the same level. But when it comes to durability, we can't test it yet. In terms of GPU energy efficiency ratio, A11 Bionic is better than Snapdragon 835. I don't know whether Snapdragon 845 can win the respect this time.
3DMark Sling Shot, the focus of different graphic tests will be different. The 3DMark test is more favorable for Qualcomm, and the Snapdragon 845 shows the advantage of crushing.
According to Anthare's evaluation, although it is known as "entertainment scoring", it does show some problems. The Snapdragon 845's CPU, GPU and UX scores are the top level in Android phones (iOS version is not updated, and it is not suitable to be compared together), but in MEM (Memory) scores, this engineering machine is very low. The main reason is that 16G UFS flash memory has lagged behind, leading to low ROM scores. The officially launched flagship Snapdragon 845 believes that it will always have 64G ROM, some even use f2fs, and with other aspects of optimization, the total score of 270000 is not a problem.
Comparing the performance of Huawei Mate 10 Pro, One Plus 5T and Snapdragon 845 engineering machines, the total score of Snapdragon 845 is undoubtedly rolled over. Look at the small projects, CPU, GPU and UX are all under no pressure to leave the other two mobile phones. The main difference is in the MEM score, of which Mate 10 Pro has a particularly high score because it uses f2fs, which greatly improves the score in storage.
Finally, we present Master Lu's AI performance test, which is more entertaining. Snapdragon 845 won the fourth place, behind the three mobile phones using Kirin 970. I feel that this test has a special "optimization" tendency. For the time being, there is no generally recognized criterion for AI performance, and the mobile phones with high scores here do not show special advantages in practical applications. We can only expect further development of AI technology to create more practical application scenarios for users.
4. Snapdragon 845 vs Snapdragon 835 big folder compression test
Snapdragon 845 uses the new Kryo 385 core, and the ARM based Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 have been "magic changed". How much improvement will be made in daily performance compared with Snapdragon 835? Love to play computer games The folder (total size 560M) of 845 engineering machine and Xiaomi MIX2 was also compressed and compared. Please click the following video:
For the convenience of users with poor network speed, the comparison results are directly released here:
Xiaolong 845 Engineering Machine vs Xiaomi MIX2 Big Folder Compression Comparison
5. Snapdragon 845 vs Snapdragon 835 Manhattan test and video playback power consumption comparison
After testing the performance of Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm also showed us the improvement in power consumption control of Snapdragon 845. First is the Manhattan scene test of Snapdragon 845 (Open screen, lock 30FPS) After about 2000 seconds of running time, the average power consumption is 2934.55mW On the 4K 60FPS video playback test, the average power consumption is 1602.75mW。
In terms of Snapdragon 835, the average power consumption after 3734.56 seconds is 3775.17mW , 2934.55W compared with Snapdragon 845, Snapdragon 835 consumes 29% more power in the same frame number of game test scenarios than Snapdragon 845 。 After 3240.70 seconds of 4K 60FPS video playback, the average power consumption of Snapdragon 835 is 2077.10mW, Nearly 30% more power than Snapdragon 845 These two data are of reference value, proving that the energy efficiency of Snapdragon 845 has been greatly improved under the same use scenario.
On the other hand, Iooko also asked Qualcomm's staff, if they let go (that is, both are in the extreme performance), which one will have the higher GPU power consumption of Snapdragon 845 and Snapdragon 835? Qualcomm said that the GPU performance of Snapdragon 845 is significantly improved compared with Snapdragon 835, and the peak power consumption is estimated to be higher. However, under the same output performance, the power consumption of Snapdragon 845 will be much better controlled.
Snapdragon 845 vs Snapdragon 835 Power Consumption Comparison
6. Summary
From the experience of this engineering machine, we can see that the performance of the Snapdragon 845 is really as powerful as expected, CPU single core and multi-core Performance Significant improvement , and GPU Is Smooth upgrade We are also looking forward to its performance in the game. When participating in the new SoC test of Qualcomm, Qualcomm also emphasized that they are more committed to continuous high output performance (as shown in the figure above, the blue estimate refers to A11 Bionic, and the purple is Snapdragon 835). We believe that the energy efficiency ratio of this new chip will not disappoint us.
This experience of the Snapdragon 845 engineering machine is only for testing some basic performance of the Snapdragon 845. Although it also involves CPU, GPU, memory and other parts, it can not fully reflect the performance of the Snapdragon 845 X20 LTE Modem, Hexagon 685 DSP, Spectra 280 ISP, independent security processing unit Such advanced characteristics cannot be reflected in these scores. Since the end of February, there will be mobile phones (Galaxy S9/S9+, Xiaomi MIX2s, etc!
Appendix: More live photos of Snapdragon 845 engineering machine
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