Qualcomm’s next-gen flagship chip appears on benchmarks!


Not official yet, the chipset doesn’t even have a name, but we now have a hint about its specs.

An unknown Vivo phone with the rumored Snapdragon 898 chipset has appeared on Geekbench. The phone in question is a “Vivo V2102A” which is still a yet-to-be-named device. This phone could either be part of Vivo’s iQoo brand of gaming smartphones or part of the flagship X series.

According to Geekbench, this phone has a single-core score of 720 and a multi-core score of 1919 which are significantly lower than the SD888. The device runs Android 12. This listing was first leaked by a reliable tipster on Twitter named Abishek Yadav. This chipset is codenamed: “taro”

As seen from the source code, the chipset would be using an Adreno 730 GPU and will be based on a Samsung 4nm process. Previous flagship Snapdragon chipsets were based on a TSMC process but this time it would be different. Qualcomm has been experimenting with different foundry companies like Intel and Samsung for their next line of chipsets.

For the CPU, the chipset interestingly has lower clock rate compared to its predecessor. The base frequency listed on Geekbench is 1.78GHz and the phone in question has 8GB RAM (odd numbers don’t count, so it’s not 7GB RAM). It is also listed as an Octa-core chipset using an ARM V8 architecture. However we all know that the SD898 would actually be based on an ARM V9 architecture, not V8, and this device is purely a placeholder, something we can’t rely on for the chipset

Snapdragon 898-powered vivo pops-up on GeekBench

According to ARM, the new V9 architecture should have significantly better energy efficiency and performance output compared to the previous V8 architecture. In the device listed above, it appears that it uses the new Cortex-X2 Super core clocked at 2.42GHz, three power cores, the Cortex-A710 CPU with a maximum of 2.17GHz clock speed and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores clocked at 1.79GHz. The Cortex X2 “main” core should have a maximum clock speed of 3.09GHz which is higher than the Cortex X1 used for the Snapdragon 888+, and that has been overclocked already.

For connectivity, the chipset should carry Qualcomm’s new X65 5G modem that is capable of up to 10Gbps download speeds. In addition, Machine Learning will also significantly improve.

As the next flagship chipsets from Mediatek and Qualcomm are nearing, we can see multiple manufacturers racing to get the chipset first. The first guys to finish almost always get the top recognition so it won’t be a surprise if there are leaks pertaining to the latest phone with a Snapdragon 898 chip for the course of 2022.

Source: Twitter, Digital Chat Station (Weibo, in Chinese), GSMArena, Geekbench