It is true benchmarks don’t represent the real-world performance of a device, but they give us a picture of what to expect. This is exactly what you are getting with the latest Huawei P20 benchmark on Geekbench, one of the leading benchmarking platforms around.

With less than two weeks before Huawei takes the wraps off the P20 series, we have our first benchmarks of the 2018 Huawei flagship phone and from the look of things, the Kirin 970-powered handset will be a great performer, at least based on 2017 standards.

From the benchmarks, the Huawei P20 managed a score of 1878 in single-core tests and 6699 in multi-core tests. Regardless of how impressive these scores look, you might want to take note that they are similar to the Galaxy S8, a phone that has since been succeeded by the Galaxy S9. Speaking of which, the S9 has been recording some impressive scores of above 3500 in single-core tests and over 8500 in multi-core tests.

Huawei P20 benchmarks

This should be worrying for Huawei, especially since the P20 is expected to go head-to-head with the S9 in the flagship market. As much as we’d like to believe that the low benchmark scores might be as a result of this being a pre-production unit, a quick look at the Huawei Mate 10 benchmarks, which also has the same Kirin 970 chipset, Android Oreo (although an older version) and 4GB RAM, reveals just about the same results.

Despite the supposedly slow performance, the Huawei P20 will go one-up by debuting with Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box, which is a nice gesture by the Chinese OEM. Still, it’s worth noting that the Kirin 970 is no slouch either, which should mean the P20 will be equally fast, but probably not Galaxy S9 fast.

Huawei will be holding an event in Paris on March 27, which is when we’ll know everything about the P20, P20 Pro and P20 Lite.