These are the phones with the best performance right now

For anyone with a love of numbers and tables, Android benchmarks are a treasure trove of information that most people can’t even decipher, let alone appreciate. When it comes to Android benchmarks there are few options more widely known and quoted as AnTuTu. While it’s easy to dismiss benchmarks as artificial simulations of real-world performance, they do allow for some very interesting comparisons.

AnTuTu has put out its list of the top ten smartphones with the best performance for May 2016, and there’s a few interesting tidbits to glean from the data. First off, the top three are all phones packing the Snapdragon 820 – perhaps not too surprising, but still noteworthy considering the existence of next-gen SoCs from the likes of HUAWEI and Samsung. The top three all have 6 GB of RAM.

Secondly, there’s only one non-Chinese company in the top five: Samsung, with the Galaxy S7 Edge. The top four are all Chinese companies (with the fourth place Xiaomi Mi 5 using a Snapdragon 820 with 4 GB of RAM), showing just how serious Chinese hardware has become in terms of unadulterated performance. Here’s the full list for your consideration:

The number one spot was taken by the vivo Xplay 5 Elite, with the LeEco Le Max 2, ZUK Z2 Pro and Xiaomi Mi 5 in hot pursuit. The Galaxy S7 Edge just squeezed into the top five ahead of the iPhone 6s and iPhone SE. The LG G5 took eighth place, followed by a substantial drop in benchmark results to ninth and tenth place, occupied by the Meizu Pro 6 and honor V8 respectively.

Make of the list what you will, but as far as benchmarks can be trusted, there is a pretty clear advantage to those devices packing an additional 2 GB of RAM. The Snapdragon 820 is certainly posting solid numbers, hopefully putting the nightmare of the Snapdragon 810 to rest for good.

With the OnePlus 3, Galaxy Note 6, Moto Z, LG V10 successor and whatever Sony might put out this year still to come, performance on Android has never looked better. With specs an order of magnitude better than the computer I got through high school with, when you hear someone say that Android performance across the board is “good enough” these days, just know the specs war is far from over.

How many on the list would you have picked? Which would you buy if you could?