It took two years for Qualcomm to finally beat HUAWEI’s dominance in AI!

AI is widely touted as the future of the smartphone industry. After all, what’s better than a device that can help you take better images and also respond to you contextually? That’s what HUAWEI has been pioneering since the HUAWEI Mate 10 series, and they have been doing very well, but will see their throne usurped by next generation hardware very soon.

According to AI Benchmark’s database, the Snapdragon 8150 will deliver more than 80% higher performance at AI-related tasks than the Kirin 980. The upcoming MediaTek P80 looks to be a dark horse in this race too, delivering nearly 60% higher benchmark scores. Still, it’s worth noting that the HUAWEI Mate 20 Pro is still currently the fastest device you can buy now, except for the OnePlus 6, which is a hair faster than the HUAWEI Mate 20 Pro in this chart.

The footnote does reveal that the OnePlus 6 in question might be running unofficial firmware, and that it offers acceleration for both float and quantized AI models, while HUAWEI’s Kirin chipsets only offer native acceleration for float AI models. But still, that’s a pretty impressive showing for the Snapdragon 845. Other Snapdragon 845 devices do fall in line below the HUAWEI flagships, but if the OEMs push out updates to accelerate AI processing, they too could potentially deliver amazing AI performance.

It would be interesting to see what the Helio P70 scores in this benchmark too once the Realme U1 launches, as it features a fancy new APU to handle AI-related tasks. Whether it will come up ahead of the Snapdragon 845 devices remain to be seen.

With more manufacturers offering dedicated hardware to tackle neural processing, the race might just get more interesting. Samsung’s next-gen chipset is notably missing from this list, and we hope to see it soon.

Pokdepinion: It seems like there is still a lot of untapped potential in the Snapdragon 845!