Highly anticipated: Google's upcoming Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL have high expectations to live up to compared to their predecessors. As leaks continue leading up to their launch, a new benchmark shows some respectable performance, but not competing for the coveted top spot.
Recently we have seen photos of a white Google Pixel 3 XL that is believed to be an early engineering sample. Even though the general appearance of the device appears to be relatively well known, the internals are still somewhat under wraps aside from speculation based on previous versions.
A benchmark spotted on Geekbench shows further details of the Pixel 3 XL, or at least the details of a sample unit. Even though samples will often share the same name as the finished product, smartphones generally go through several iterations before arriving at the finished product.
Below are the benchmark results showing single-core and multi-core scores slightly above that of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, but below that of Samsung's Exynos processor. However, given that the Exynos 9810 has some unresolved issues that are detailed in our Galaxy S9+ review, that may be a moot point.
As expected the Pixel 3 XL is running Android 9.0. Since this version of Android is still under development and we do not know which build version was used, actual performance could be fairly similar to what we see here or significantly better for the finished product.
One area where Google could be slacking a little is in the memory department. Other smartphone makers such as OnePlus have started adding additional memory for better multitasking and gaming. Even Samsung has 6GB of memory in its S9+. However, Apple only has 3GB of memory in the iPhone X and there are not any outcries of performance issues, so Google may be able to sneak by for one more year with only 4GB of memory.
It is also possible that Google may change the amount of memory for its final version anyways, but we will have to wait a few more weeks for the official unveiling.