POCO F9 Ultra Hits Geekbench With Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16GB RAM

The POCO F9 Ultra is getting closer to launch, and we now have a better idea of what is hiding inside. The phone has appeared on Geekbench with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and 16GB of RAM. That is proper flagship hardware, although the benchmark scores themselves are not quite as exciting as I expected.

The Geekbench listing belongs to a Xiaomi device with model number 25102PCBEG, which has already been linked to the global POCO F9 Ultra. It runs Android 16 and comes with 16GB of RAM. More importantly, the CPU details point to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

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.

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.

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.