First benchmarks of Snapdragon 1000 (8180) show up on Geekbench

The first benchmarks of Qualcomm’s rumoured Snapdragon 1000 desktop-class processor has been spotted on Geekbench.

Designated the Snapdragon 8180, the 8 core processor was spotted in a so-called MTP (Mobile Test Platform) configuration, though with 15 watts of potential thermal dissipation the processor is certainly not destined for any smartphone.

Winfuture.de, who keeps an eye on these kinds of things, reports that the performance of the Snapdragon 8180 was 53% faster than the Snapdragon 835 on the most common single core operations and 31% faster in multi-core operations. This would mean a much snappier performance than the current generation of Windows 10 on ARM devices, and these are of course early, unoptimised benchmarks. Compared to the Snapdragon 850, which will soon start showing up in Windows 10 on ARM devices, the improvements are not that impressive, being 8.7% faster in single core and 23% faster in multi-core operations, but again these are early benchmarks which are also being performed via emulation rather than native code, and the device should run a lot faster with re-compiled ARM64 apps when these become available.

Currently, the only device expected to sport the new processor is theAsus Primus, but Winfuture notes that the performance of the Snapdragon 8180 was already comparable to that of the Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y in the Surface Go, suggesting Intel may soon see real competition in the lower-powered laptop and tablet segment.