Samsung Galaxy S7 for T-Mobile benchmarked, Snapdragon 820 delivers

The Galaxy S7 is just around the corner (February 21 announcement confirmed) and it's fair to say that Samsung will have little to surprise us with on the keynote. Specs and looks have been leaked time and time again to the tiniest detail, and the smartphone just can't come soon enough for us to actually put it through its paces.

In the meantime, reports keep coming in on the S7's performance and it's hard not to be impressed with its alleged 2-day battery life. And now we're being treated to some GeekBench scores of what is likely a near final unit bound for US carrier T-Mobile.

The Galaxy S7 in question is powered by the Snapdragon 820 (Exynos 8890 versions should also supposedly exist) and posts some pretty high numbers. The single-core result in particular is mightily impressive at around 2,300 points, while the Huawei Mate 8 we reviewed recently only managed about 1,600 with one of its Cortex-72 cores.

Mind you, today's numbers are much higher than initial reports suggested, meaning Samsung and Qualcomm held back on performance in early designs. Today's figures are virtually the same as what Qualcomm's reference units were able to put out, which leads us to believe this is the Snapdragon 820 in its final form. That said, a single one of the Kryo cores inside Qualcomm's top chip is still behind (if only slightly) one of Apple's Twister cores in the A9 SoC found in the latest iPhone 6s.

All four cores in the S820, on the other hand, easily top Apple's CPU, which only has a pair of Twisters. That said, T-Mobile's Galaxy S7 is still no match for the Mate 8 in the multi-core test. We'll be anticipating the Exynos 8890 to see how all of this year's flagship chips measure up.

And if you believe none of this is actually relevant in the real life anymore, when high-end chips have surpassed the average user's needs, you may be half-right. But there are those that will take any performance improvement they can get - even better if paired with excellent battery life.

Source | Via