The Sony Xperia Z Ultra is not only an enormous 6.4″ beast of a phablet but it also belongs to a very exclusive group of devices that have the Snapdragon 800 chipset up and running. We got our hands on the device once again and this time we even managed to run a few synthetic benchmarks and see how much of a performance update you are actually getting.
The device should be very zippy courtesy of four Krait 400 cores clocked way up at 2.2 GHz and 2 gigs of RAM. The graphics are dealt with by the latest Adreno 330 GPU, which we’ve heard does a pretty good job.
So let’s look at the numbers. With the hardware specifics out of the way the only thing left to do is analyze the scores. First comes BenchmarkPi, which gives a premium on per-core calculations performance. Here the Sony Xperia Z Ultra was a point shy of tying the first spot – an impressive result indeed, but not quite the one we expected.
Benchmark Pi
Lower is better
- Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE118
- Sony Xperia Z Ultra119
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)132
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)132
- HTC One GPE145
- HTC One151
- Sony Xperia Z264
- HTC Butterfly266
- Oppo Find 5267
- HTC One X+280
- LG Optimus G285
- Samsung Galaxy Note II305
- HTC One X (Tegra 3)330
- LG Optimus 4X HD350
- Samsung Galaxy S III359
- Meizu MX 4-core362
- Nexus 4431
Geekbench 2 is a CPU and memory benchmark and is a pretty good place to compare devices running on different platforms. Here, the Xperia Z Ultra scored an impressive victory over its Android rivals, while the Apple iPhone 5 simply got blown out of the water.
Geekbench 2
Higher is better
- Sony Xperia Z Ultra3889
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)3324
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)3227
- Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE3211
- HTC One GPE2458
- HTC One2708
- Sony Xperia Z2173
- HTC Butterfly2143
- Samsung Galaxy S III1845
- LG Optimus G1723
- LG Optimus 4X HD1661
- Apple iPhone 51601
And finally AnTuTu, a compound benchmark. The Sony Xperia Z Ultra totally wipes the floor with the opposition once again, beating the previous best score by nearly 30%.
AnTuTu
Higher is better
- Sony Xperia Z Ultra33832
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (Octa)26275
- Samsung Galaxy S4 GPE25755
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (S600)24716
- HTC One22678
- Sony Xperia Z20794
- HTC One GPE18919
- HTC Butterfly19513
- Samsung Galaxy S III15547
- Oppo Find 515167
These results are really the most impressive we’ve seen on a production device even if the CPU-only test turned out surprisingly low (we’ll be redoing that with another unit when we get the smartphone in our office). The new Snapdragon 800 chipset is certainly shaping up to be the beast everyone expected it to become and will most probably be the yardstick against which all other chipsets will be measured for at least another six months (that’s ages in smartphone time).
