A new Honor smartphone has popped up in early benchmark testing, and it could be the first real hint at what’s coming next for the brand’s battery-focused lineup. The device, believed to be the Honor Power 2, has appeared on Geekbench with MediaTek’s upcoming Dimensity 8500 chipset, giving us an early look at expected performance and core specifications.
Honor launched the original Honor Power earlier this year and made headlines largely thanks to its huge 8,000 mAh battery. Now, with a successor seemingly on the way, many fans are wondering whether the next model will bring a meaningful speed boost to match its endurance-first identity. Based on this early listing, the jump might be modest.
The benchmark entry shows a device identified as “Honor SER-AN00” running with 12 GB of RAM. In its best recorded result, the Dimensity 8500 posted a single-core score of 1,728 and a multi-core score of 6,762. For context, the Dimensity 8400 typically lands around 1,621 single-core and 6,208 multi-core. That works out to roughly a 7% improvement, at least in this particular test.
It’s worth keeping expectations in check, though. Geekbench results can vary depending on software version, thermal limits, and whether the device is running pre-release firmware. Early benchmark leaks are useful for clues, but they’re not always the final word on real-world performance.
What makes this leak especially interesting is how closely the Dimensity 8500 seems to resemble the Dimensity 8400 on paper. The core layout shown in the listing appears identical, with slight clock speed boosts across the board. The prime core is listed at 3.40 GHz compared to 3.25 GHz on the Dimensity 8400. The next cluster includes three cores at 3.20 GHz versus 3.0 GHz previously, while the efficiency cores tick up to 2.20 GHz from 2.10 GHz. Whether these are the exact same CPU cores or an updated revision isn’t confirmed yet, but the configuration suggests an iterative upgrade rather than a major redesign.
The GPU details also point in a similar direction. The Dimensity 8500 listing mentions an ARM Mali-G720 MC8 GPU. The Dimensity 8400 uses a Mali-G720 MC7, so while there is a small bump in configuration, it doesn’t immediately signal a dramatic leap in graphics performance.
Taken together, the early picture of the Honor Power 2 is starting to form: a new model that may prioritize refinement and efficiency over headline-grabbing performance gains. If Honor sticks to the Power series formula, the bigger story could once again be battery life—especially if the company keeps anything close to that massive capacity while pairing it with a slightly faster, slightly more efficient chip.
For now, the key takeaway is simple: the Honor Power 2 appears to be in testing with the MediaTek Dimensity 8500 and 12 GB of RAM, and early benchmarks suggest a small performance uplift rather than a big generational jump. As more listings and official details surface, we’ll get a clearer idea of what Honor is planning and when the phone might launch.
