Last March may have been the busiest month in mobile telephony in China. On average, one smartphone was released per day and 35 new smartphones were released throughout the month. Which has led several users to joke that a number of smartphones have already been launched in one month to be sufficient for the whole year.
AnTuTu releases the general ranking of March: here are the best performing smartphones
In any case, among these smartphones, there are 16 flagship devices equipped with Snapdragon 888, 4 models equipped with Snapdragon 870 and others equipped with Dimensity 1200 and Kirin 9000 5G. With data coming from the AnTuTu Android APP from 03.01 to 03.31 and which includes only the models released during this period.
In this list, the best performances belong to the ASUS ROG Phone 5 Phantom, which ranked first on the performance list among March devices with an average score of 947284.
This smartphone sees for the first time in the world 5GB SK Hynix LPDDR18 memory and the storage space is 3.1GB UFS 512, a big advantage in terms of memory performance. These are also the first 18GB memory data collected by AnTuTu. At the moment, most gaming smartphones can reach up to 16GB, while 18GB is still very rare.
New devices like Black Shark 4 Pro and Red Devils 6 Pro are at the top of the chart. Aside from gaming smartphones, we have the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra, Mi 11 Pro and OnePlus 9 which have become the leaders of the flagships. The Xiaomi 11 Pro has proclaimed itself the king of Android devices, Xiaomi 11 Ultra even shouted the slogan “The light of Android”, while the OnePlus 9 series focuses on taking pictures.
These three new devices are true all-round flagships for the month of March, with almost no flaws.
There are also many semi-flagships equipped with Snapdragon 870 in March. The Xiaomi 10S, Black Shark 4, iQOO Neo5, OPPO Find X3 are all equipped with this processor. Due to the significant power consumption and supply issues of Snapdragon 888 this year, most smartphone makers have chosen the Snapdragon 888 + Snapdragon 870 combination for their flagship series.
Huawei has also released two new models, namely the new cheaper version, the Huawei Mate40E and the more premium Huawei Mate40 RS equipped with Kirin 990E. While the Light Luxury version of the Honor V40 is equipped with Dimensity 800U.
In terms of mid-to-high-end models, Il Vivo S9 is in first place, followed by the Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite and ZTE S30 Pro. A dozen mid-to-high-end models were released in March, many of them featuring new processors.
In addition to the new devices, another March feature is the new processors. The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite brought the Snapdragon 780G processor for the first time, while the iQOO U3x debuted the Snapdragon 480.
It is worth mentioning that the long-awaited Dimensity 1100 and Dimensity 1200 are finally within mass production devices.
The Snapdragon 780G abandons the old tradition of 2 large cores and adopts a 1 + 3 + 4 architecture, the Samsung 5nm process. It consists of one ultra-large A78 core clocked at 2.4GHz and 3 large A78 cores clocked at 2.2GHz. It consists of a small A55 core frequency of 1,9GHz, built-in X53 5G base band, but only supports LPDDR4X.
The ISP has been upgraded from Spectra 355 to Spectra 570, which is the same as Snapdragon 888, and the GPU is Adreno 642. This processor is positioned in the mid-range, with higher performance than Snapdragon 765G and lower than Snapdragon 870. The advantage main is that the power consumption is much lower than the Snapdragon 870.
The Snapdragon 480 is instead an entry-level chip produced with an 8nm process, it uses the Adreno 619 GPU, with performance lower than Dimensity 700.
We then have the Dimensity 1200 adopts the 6nm TSMC process, has 1 large 78 GHz Cortex-A3,0 core, 3 78 GHz Cortex-A2,6 cores and 4 55 GHz Cortex-A2,0 cores and the GPU is G77 MC9.
While the Dimensity 1100 is the low frequency version of the Dimensity 1200, 6nm process, still 1 + 3 + 4 architecture, the main frequency of the big core is reduced to 2,6 GHz, the GPU is not overclocked. It supports UFS3.1 memory, LPDDR4x RAM and is a mid-range chip.
Judging by the scores, the performance of the Dimensity 1200 is the same as the Snapdragon 870 and even better than some of the new 870 models. The performance of the Dimensity 1100 is much higher than that of the Snapdragon 780G, which is close to the level of the Kirin 9000 5G.
So we can have some really interesting and ultra-competitive months between the different brands.
