This Google Pixel 8a benchmark suggests it might not be worth buying

Underclocked and underperforming

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Google’s mid-range a-series phones generally do a good job of providing the essence of its flagships at a lower price, but theGoogle Pixel 8amight fail at this, going by an early benchmark.

You see, one of the high points of this line is that the phones use the same chipsets as the company’s flagships. So thePixel 7ahas the same chipset as thePixel 7and even thePixel 7 Pro. But aGeekbenchlisting – spotted byGSMArena– suggests that while the Google Pixel 8a will have the same Tensor G3 chipset as the standardPixel 8is expected to have, it will be an underclocked version.

According to the listing – which is for a device with a codename previously attached to the Pixel 8a – this phone has a chipset with a prime core clocked at 2.91GHz, four performance cores running at 2.37GHz, and four efficiency cores running at 1.70GHz.

For reference, the standard version of the Tensor G3 reportedly has a 3GHz prime core, 2.45GHz performance cores, and 2.15GHz efficiency cores. So in every case the cores in this benchmark are slower.

That explains the rather unimpressive results, with the Pixel 8a achieving a single-core score of 1,218 and a multi-core result of 3,175. For comparison, the Pixel 7 Pro (which uses an older Tensor G2 chipset) has average single-core results of 1,404 and multi-core score of 3,363.

So the Pixel 7 Pro has slightly better results, but despite the Pixel 8a being a lower-end phone we’d have expected it to beat the Pixel 7 Pro comfortably, as we were expecting a full-speed version of the Tensor G3.

A question of price

So if this benchmark – which also mentions 8GB of RAM andAndroid 14– is accurate, then the Pixel 8a might not prove a particularly appealing phone.

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Of course, it will all largely come down to price, and perhaps Google will look to make this more affordable than the Pixel 7a was at launch, in which case it could still have a fighting chance. But if you can afford it, we suspect the standard Pixel 8 – or one of the existingbest Pixel phones– will be a better buy.

Still, one other thing this benchmark tells us is that there likely will be a Pixel 8a, which previously some leaks had suggested there wouldn’t be. So it’s not all bad news for fans of Google’s a-series.

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James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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