We’re just days away from Samsung’s next Unpacked event in NYC where the Galaxy Note 9 will be unveiled. As has become the norm in recent years, the upcoming phone has already leaked extensively in the months leading up to the official announcement, but it looks like Samsung might have at least one surprise left in store.
On Monday, Dutch smartphone news blog Mobielkopen.net was among the first to point out a new benchmark that was just recently uploaded on Geekbench. We’ve already covered multiple Galaxy Note 9 benchmarks over the past few weeks, from the US model to the unlocked model. All of them carried some variation of the model number SM-N960, and all were fairly easy to identify. That’s not the case for the SM-N960X benchmark.
Unlike the Korean and international models, each of which featured Exynos 9810 processors in their benchmarks, the SM-N960X device appears to be loaded with an Exynos 9820 chipset. As such, its scores top those of all the previous models we’ve seen on Geekbench, with a single-core score of 4089 and a multi-core score of 12246.
For comparison’s sake, the latest alleged Note 9 benchmark with an Exynos 9810 processor had scores of 3716 and 8984, respectively. That is a significant boost in performance. Even more impressive, the multi-core score of this Note 9 crushes that of the iPhone X, which has a score of 10127. Provided this leak is legitimate (which it very well might not be), there is a Note 9 model that could overpower Apple’s most powerful phone.
The existence of this benchmark is sure to create some confusion, as Samsung either decided to upgrade the Note 9 hardware at the last minute or plans to introduce an overpowered Note 9 alongside the standard model next month. That, or the leak is bogus, but we’ll find out for sure in New York City on August 9th.
