Hardware Overview and CPU Performance
The Nexus 6P comes loaded with a Snapdragon 810, which is Qualcomm's highest-end and pretty controversial SoC. Interestingly, this is the first smartphone I've reviewed that has the Snapdragon 810 paired with a 1440p display, with basically every other device (like the HTC One M9 and Sony Xperia Z5) opting for a 1080p display instead. The 810 and its powerful GPU is made for 1440p smartphones, so it's good to see the SoC finally get the display pairing it deserves.
I've looked at the Snapdragon 810 extensively in the past, but as a quick refresher, the SoC in the Nexus 6P comes with four ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores clocked at 1.96 GHz, plus four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.56 GHz, for a total of eight cores in two clusters. There's also an LPDDR4 memory controller attached to 3 GB of RAM, providing 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth, and an Adreno 430 GPU clocked at 650 MHz.
Connectivity-wise, the Snapdragon 810 comes with all the latest and greatest stuff, including Wi-Fi 820.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS+GLONASS, and up to Category 9 LTE. The Nexus 6P comes in several models depending on your location, so it's always a good idea to check with your carrier to ensure you're purchasing the right model. External to the Snapdragon 810 is an NFC chip.
The Nexus 6P is equipped with 32, 64 or 128 GB of internal NAND depending on what model you purchase. There is no expandable storage, though, so it's a good idea to get a large capacity model if you want to store a lot of apps, photos, videos or music. I got the 32 GB model to review, which had 25 GB available to use, and I found that fine for the apps and other content I wanted to store on the device.
Performance from the Nexus 6P around the operating system and in apps is pretty good, and it feels slightly more responsive than the Nexus 5X. I wouldn't say the handset is as fast to use as the iPhone 6s, especially in app loading, but the 6P is certainly a power user's device with the ability to multitask with ease. As this is stock Android on a powerful device, I didn't notice any lag or stutter either, which is to be expected.
In our CPU-limited benchmarks, the performance of the Nexus 6P is on-par with the Samsung Galaxy S6, and slightly slower than the best Snapdragon 810 device we've reviewed previously, the Sony Xperia Z5. The 6P also clocks in at around 9% faster than the Nexus 5X and its Snapdragon 808 SoC.