Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is confirmed
The chip has two prime cores running at up to 4.61GHz and six performance cores at 3.63GHz. That’s exactly what we expect from Qualcomm’s current flagship platform.
The phone scored 3,167 points in Geekbench 6.6.0 single-core and 9,674 in multi-core. Those are good numbers, but they are a little lower than some other phones using the same chip.
Here’s the thing, though. I wouldn’t read too much into an early benchmark.
Pre-release phones often run unfinished software, and Xiaomi may still be working on power and thermal settings. Geekbench also tells us very little about how the phone will perform after 30 minutes of gaming, which matters far more on a device like this.
It could be a Redmi K100 Pro Max in disguise
The POCO F9 Ultra is expected to be based on the Redmi K100 Pro Max, which will launch in China before the global POCO model arrives. That’s hardly surprising. Xiaomi has used Redmi phones as the base for several POCO flagships in the past.
Previous leaks point to a 6.85-inch OLED display with a 165Hz refresh rate. The F9 Ultra could also get a huge 9,000mAh battery with 100W wired charging, although global models sometimes get smaller batteries than their Chinese versions.
And yes, that last detail matters.
If POCO keeps anything close to 9,000mAh for the global model, battery life could become one of the F9 Ultra’s biggest selling points. We have already reached the stage where raw flagship speed is easy to find. A phone that combines that speed with two-day battery life is much more interesting to me.
POCO is moving further upmarket
The “Ultra” name also tells us where POCO wants to take this phone. The company spent years building its reputation around affordable performance, but the F series has slowly moved closer to traditional flagships.
The F9 Ultra looks ready to continue that move.
We still need the final cameras, battery size and price before making any real judgment. But Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16GB of RAM already tell us one thing: POCO isn’t building a flagship killer this time. It may simply be building a flagship.
