AnTuTu has published its most recent rankings, and the Global Top 10 Performance Smartphones for May 2017 sees the HTC U11 take the crown. The U11 with the Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM scored 1800899 points, which was about 6000 points of the Apple iPhone 7 Plus which scored 174299 points to rank second.
The benchmarking website says that the reason why the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus were ranked lower, was because of the single-core and UX tests, which may have been caused by iOS 10.3.
It is worth noting that the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor (which powers HTC U11), only managed to just surpass the Apple A11 processor, which was introduced about a year ago. Though I'm an Android user, I have to admire Apple's tech, which is miles ahead of Qualcomm's so called “innovation”. So, once the A12 or whatever chipset is used in the Apple iPhone 8, will probably beat the Snapdragon 835 with ease.
The Xiaomi Mi 6 with the Snapdragon 835 processor'/6GB of RAM, and 172494 points took the third place, while the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus with 172367 and 172359 points ranked 4th and 5th respectively, though it is unclear whether these were the Exynos 8895 or Snapdragon 835 variants.
The OnePlus 3T with its Snapdragon 821 processor, and the OnePlus 3 with the Snapdragon 820, somehow managed to take the 7th and 8th ranks with 158861 and 158616 points respectively. But we are skeptical about these results, as OnePlus has been caught cheating in the benchmarks before.The LeEco Le Pro3 grabbed the penultimate spot in the chart, with a score of 156637, also with a Snapdragon 821. The final place in the rankings was taken by the Snapdragon 820 powered LeEco Le Max, with a 150682 score.
The OnePlus 5 is not in the chart as it was released after May 31st, 2017.
We don’t believe benchmarks are the perfect example to rank any phone, as real world usage can never be beaten, and also you could use custom ROMs to improve the performance.
But, this chart does highlight which phones are the most popular ones. To be frank, it does show that Qualcomm doesn’t add much to its chipsets, with each new generation. Seeing devices powered by the Snapdragon 820, 821 and the 835 in the same chart proves that. It is more of the same thing over and over, with few new benefits. Want more proof about this ? How about the fact that the LG G6, one of the latest flagships, is missing in the list. Is it really a surprise omission from the rankings ? Other absentees from the list are MediaTek and Huawei Kirin powered devices, the latter is very surprising as we have seen Kirin 950 devices perform well while gaming, and is capable of going toe to toe with Snapdragon powered flagships.