The LG G4 has turned up on GFXBench, but it’s not using Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 810 mobile chip.
Instead, the LG flagship seemingly comes packing the slightly less powerful Snapdragon 808 (via GSMarena), a chip that was announced in April 2014 alongside the Snapdragon 810.
That’s interesting for several reasons; most notably that the new LG G Flex 2 carries the Snapdragon 810.
The LG G Flex series has traditionally been seen as a spin-off from the main G-series smartphones, so it seems odd that that LG would opt for a lower-performance chip on a flagship device.
Why would they do this? Our best guess is that LG is concerned about the public reception to the Snapdragon 810.
The past few months have seen a torrent of rumours suggesting that the Snapdragon 810 struggles with overheating issues.
Chip-maker Qualcomm has denied this, of course, but the prospect of a dodgy chip is definitely a turn off for much of the tech community.
Opting for a less powerful – and potentially cooler running – mobile chip could be just the thing to assuage consumer concerns. LG can’t really afford to get its flagship smartphone wrong.
LG wouldn’t be the first manufacturer to opt out of Snapdragon 810-dom either. Samsung has used its own custom-built Exynos series on its latest flagship smartphones, namely the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.
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The benchmark scores appear to show that the LG G4 is less powerful than the G Flex 2 but more powerful than the LG G3, across various metrics. These include GFX 3.0 Manhattan 1080p offscreen and onscreen rendering.
We've asked LG for official comment on the matter of the Snapdragon 808 and we'll update you if we receive any new information.
So what else did the benchmark reveal? A 5.5-inch, 2560 x 1440 display, 3GB of memory, and 32GB of storage, for a start.
It will also use a 16-megapixel camera on the rear, with the front-facing image sensor measuring in at 8-megapixels.
The LG G4 is expected to launch in April, so stay tuned for more.
