The first set of Snapdragon 855-powered Android devices are set to be unveiled next month. The Galaxy S10 is probably going to be the first followed by flagship devices from other OEMs at MWC 2019. Ahead of that though, the first set of Snapdragon 855 benchmarks have been released giving us a look at what to expect from flagship Android devices this year.

Multiple publications got their hands on a Qualcomm Reference Design phone packing a Snapdragon 855 and put the chip through its paces. Depending on the benchmark you follow and prefer, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 offers a performance boost of anywhere between 20 percent to 80 percent over the Snapdragon 845. That’s a massive performance leap on a year-on-year basis and makes the Snapdragon 855 a more respectable chip when compared to the likes of Apple’s A12 Bionic and Huawei’s Kirin 980.

In run-of-the-mill benchmarks like AnTuTu, GFXBench, and Geekbench, the reference Snapdragon 855 device beat the Google Pixel 3 featuring a Snapdragon 845 chip by anywhere between 42 to 74 percent.

The major improvements in CPU performance come from Qualcomm switching to ARM’s Cortex-A76 architecture and using a 1+3 CPU configuration in which the single ‘Prime’ core is bigger than the other three cores and can reach clock speeds as high as 2.8GHz.

In most benchmarks done by AnandTech, the Snapdragon 855 and Kirin 980 perform very similarly, with the Qualcomm chip edging out the Huawei chip in most benchmarks albeit by a small margin.

When we look at GPU performance, the Adreno 640 GPU inside the Snapdragon 855 offers around 20 percent performance improvement. While that’s not much, what’s impressive is that the performance improvement comes with a huge improvement in power efficiency. As per AnandTech’s testing, the Adreon 640 GPU now only trails Apple’s custom A12 GPU at peak performance in terms of power consumption.

The improved power efficiency means the reference Snapdragon 855 device had a total power consumption of around 4.4W, down from 5W that Snapdragon 845 devices usually have.

Flagship Android devices featuring the Snapdragon 855 include the LG G8, Samsung Galaxy S10, OnePlus 7, and more. These devices are slated to hit the market in the coming month or two. If you want to know more about the Snapdragon 855 and its performance, hit the source links below.