In short, the Snapdragon 808 features two ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked at 1.82 GHz alongside four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.44 GHz, resulting in a two-cluster, hexa-core configuration. There’s also an Adreno 418 GPU clocked at 600 MHz, and a 64-bit LPDDR3 memory controller providing 14.9 GB/s of bandwidth, connected to 3 GB of RAM in the Moto X Style.
As for connectivity, the Moto X Style packs Category 6 LTE, HSPA+, 2G, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac with MIMO support, Bluetooth 4.1 LE, GPS+GLONASS, and NFC. The LTE and HSPA+ bands in the Moto X Style differ slightly from the bands included with the Moto X Pure Edition, despite both phones being essentially identical, while the Pure Edition also supports United States’ CDMA networks. The Moto X Style also includes two “processors” that Motorola calls the “natural language processor” and “contextual computing processor”. Without taking apart the Moto X Style, it’s unclear whether these are simply part of the Snapdragon 808 or are separate chips, but they will facilitate some of Motorola’s always-on voice and gesture features.
In CPU-heavy benchmarks, the Moto X Style outperformed the LG G4, which also features a Snapdragon 808 SoC, by just over 10 percent. I suspect this is due to better thermal management in the X Style’s design, leading to higher sustained clock speeds, as well as improved software across the board. The Moto X Style marginally falls behind the other top Android devices out there. The Galaxy Note 5 boasts CPU performance 4% higher than the Style, while the Galaxy S6 is just 2% faster. On the other hand, the Style is faster in CPU-limited scenarios than some of the Snapdragon 810 devices I’ve reviewed, such as the OnePlus 2 (by 16%), the LG G Flex 2 (by 18%) and the HTC One M9 (by 29%). Compared to the last-generation Moto X (2014), the Moto X Style was 16% faster in CPU-limited benchmarks, and 29% faster overall after factoring in an increase in NAND performance and GPU performance.
