Why the iPhone 7 might have already defeated the upcoming Galaxy S8

2017 is coming and with will come it's own fair share of amazing gadgets and high end flagship phones. 

Another reason why next year is so special is that it is also supposed to usher in a new generation of processors, which in turn is supposed to make for faster, more powerful phones. 

There's a downer here though and that is the results of the first leaked benchmark for the next-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. It is troubling as the implications are that Samsung's Galaxy S8 might not even be as powerful as this year’s iPhone 7 and if next year's Samsung phone can't compete with this year's Apple, what hope does it have for next year?

This is not to say that Samsung have always had an edge over Apple or anything as history has shown us that usually Apple phones do better in real-world performance tests. 

While we already covered the AnTuTu benchmark, another one from Geekbench shows that the iPhone 7 is king and processes faster than any Android phone in existence at the moment.

Next year’s Android chips will be built on 10nm process technology and under normal circumstances you'd hope this means that they should be able to outperform the older A10 Fusion chip in the iPhone 7. Well, it seems you'd be wrong, just see below.

According to Phone Arena, a leaked Geekbench test of the Snapdragon 835 that’s going into the Galaxy S8 shows a single-core score of 1844 and a multi-core score of 5426. That might seem impressive, but that’s still not as impressive as the iPhone 7, which has an average score of around 3300 in single-core and about 5400 in multicore tests.

Worse still, the purported single-core Snapdragon 835 score is actually doable by some current Android devices. That’s a bit concerning and could indicate that Qualcomm and Samsung still have a long way to go until they catch Apple.

Now we can't be sure these are the real tests and even if they are, it is also possible that the Snapdragon 835 is incomplete. But if it is real, then one can genuinely say Samsung might have to mind the gap.