Early Snapdragon 850 benchmarks suggest that Qualcomm’s first PC-centric chipset may not bring hoped-for performance gains.

In a benchmark posted to Geekbench and first spotted by WinFuture.de, a Snapdragon 850-based PC scored 2263 in a single core test, a 25 percent improvement over the Snapdragon 835. But the 850-based PC netted only a 7.3 percent gain in a multi-core test, with a score of just 6947, vs. 6475 for the 835.

Qualcomm, you may recall, claimed that the Snapdragon 850 was optimized for performance and should see a 30 percent gain, overall, when compared to the 835. That’s true of both the processor, which runs at a higher clock rate, and the graphics processor.

So. What are we to make of this?

Well, it’s only one test. And Qualcomm, of course, has committed to a long-term strategy of designing custom chipsets for each market it targets. We’ve seen rumors about a coming Snapdragon 1000 as well, and that one may be aimed at desktop PCs.

But this is not good news, for sure. Today’s Snapdragon 835-based PCs are basically a non-starter. And we need to see bigger gains than this.