Snapdragon 820 Performance Preview

Testing Snapdragon 820

In usual fashion, we were invited to Qualcomm's headquarters to get a first look at Snapdragon 820’s performance. Since retail products using the 820 are not available yet (or have even been announced), we subjected Qualcomm's Mobile Development Platform (MDP) to a battery of tests.

The smartphone MDP is an oversized phone used internally by Qualcomm for testing and development. Obviously all the usual caveats apply: We’re testing pre-production hardware and software, so we could encounter some performance anomalies. Furthermore, because the MDP chassis is larger and thicker than the sleek flagship phones that will eventually house the 820, we cannot make any assessments of thermal throttling. Also, with only a limited amount of hands-on time, we’ll need to wait for shipping hardware to quantify battery life.

The data that we will be presenting then, serves as a performance preview, an early look at the 820’s potential. While the final numbers may change, our experience testing both the Snapdragon 805 and Snapdragon 810 MDPs (those were both tablets) showed good correlation with eventual shipping products.

Devices Used for Testing

Even though testing took place outside of our lab, we followed our usual testing procedures as closely as possible. We used our own benchmark files and ran each test at least twice, averaging the results, like we usually do. Because of the limited testing time, however, we did not have time to allow the MDP to cool between tests. We did not see much variation between successive runs, though, so thermal throttling did not appear to impact the results.