Benchmarks are a mantra for measuring performance on a PC. This is the only way to understand the real power of processors and video cards, be they synthetic, such as 3D Mark, or practical, like the frame rate in video games. In telephony this method of analysis is less used, indeed it is often misleading. A smartphone that has a score of 500,000 on AnTuTu can offer performance in practice similar to one that has 400,000 points, at least in the daily life.
Mobile benchmarks have therefore become less and less important in the evaluations of the phones, but they are still the only way to detect the true power, often unexpressed, of a smartphone. So we compared three of the most powerful phones available today, through AnTuTu and 3D Mark, the interesting thing is that everyone uses a different hardware platform. Exynos for Samsung with its S20 Ultra, Snapdragon for Oppo and its Find X2 Pro and Kirin for Huawei and P40 Pro: which of these will win the challenge?
Exynos, Snapdragon and Kirin compared
Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra in its American version mounts the Snapdragon 865, while in Europe the variant with Exynos 990. This SoC, realized with a 7 nm production process, uses in part some cores with Samsung's proprietary architecture, in part the classic Core ARMs, for a total of eight computing units. There are two Core Exynos M5 for the more complex operations on the computational front, which go up to 2.73 GHz, then two Core ARM Cortex-A76 for the intermediate ones, capable of reaching 2.50 GHz, and finally four Cortex-A55 for the more basic tasks, with a frequency of 1.80 GHz, while the GPU is a Mali-G77. On board the Galaxy S20 Ultra 12 GB of LPDD5 RAM are installed.
Samsung's smartphone reached 526818 points on AnTuTu, while in the Sling Shot Extreme test it reached 6716 with OpenGL and 6171 with Vulkan.
Huawei P40 Pro instead uses a 7 nm Kirin 990 SoC, the first to integrate a 5G modem inside (the others use one outside the SoC).
The configuration is once again based on eight cores overall, two 2.86 GHz Cortex-A76s, two 2.36 GHz Cortex-A76s and four 1.95 GHz Cortex-A55s, with a Mali-G76 GPU.
The smartphone of the Chinese house registered 498066 points on AnTuTu while on 3D Mark it stopped at 6057 with OpenGL and 5631 with Vulkan.
Finally there is Oppo Find X2 Pro, which houses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 at 7 nm, currently the most powerful processor produced by the American house.
This is also an Octa Core consisting of a 2.84 GHz Core Cortex-A77, three other identical but clocked at 2.4 GHz and finally four 1.8 GHz Cortex-A55, with Adreno 650 GPU. Also in this case there are 12 GB of RAM LPDDR5 under the hood.
Seen the processor mounted on this smartphone, it is not surprising that the Find X2 Pro has reached higher numbers than competitors, hitting 610278 on AnTuTu and 7076 (OpenGL) and 6455 (Vulkan) on 3D Mark.
Qualcomm's platform is the most powerful available today, probably even too much for what games and applications have to offer. In practice, the surplus of power is not evident in everyday use, all three smartphones are fluid and very responsive and work very well in any context of use.
Better performance does not always give advantages, just look at the P40 Pro, which despite having lower scores is the smartphone with the best autonomy among those compared, and it is also the one that consumed less during the test. Anyway, Oppo Find X2 Pro proved to be the top of the range with the greatest brute force among those released in the last period, too bad that we should wait even before we can see it in Italy.
