The Galaxy S4 was always expected to blow competing smartphones out of the water when it comes to performance, at least in benchmarks, just like all previous flagship Galaxy S smartphones have done. Now, the first benchmarks for the device taken with Geekbench 2 are out, and the Galaxy S4 beats every other smartphone out there quite easily.

Geekbench is a cross-platform benchmark tool, so the result includes non-Android devices like the BlackBerry Z10 and iPhone 5. The benchmark was performed on the US variant of the S4 running on a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 CPU – as you can see, even the quad-core Snapdragon chipset was successful in coming out on top with a score of 3163, scoring almost double of the Galaxy S3 running on the previous generation Exynos chipset.

The Galaxy S4 also scored almost twice more points than the iPhone 5, though the latter is running on a much lower 1.3GHz clock speed (but still gives great performance thanks to iOS running on native code with no Java slowing things down). Such a high score is still a great achievement for the Galaxy S4 though, considering the amount of pixels it needs to render on the 1080p display as well as the high amount of software features that Samsung tacks on top of stock Android.

The HTC One was the only device that scored points close to the Galaxy S4’s, as it is running the same chipset but at a lower clock speed of 1.7GHz. Both the BlackBerry Z10 and dual-core Snapdragon Galaxy S3 variants failed to impress, while the Nexus 4 held its own with a respectable score of 2040 thanks to the still powerful Snapdragon S4 Pro chipset inside.

The Galaxy S4 surely has impressive performance, but as benchmarks never tell the actual performance story, we’ll have to wait for real life performance results once the device launches. But one thing is certain – mobile performance is racing ahead at a blazing pace, and it excites me to think what the future has in store for the industry.

Thoughts?