Early benchmarks of what appears to be next year's OnePlus 9 flagship model have been posted on cell phone testing site Geekbench. And while the numbers don't impress anyone and lag far behind the iPhone 12, it's still a little early to hit the panic button.

The OnePlus 9 should be a step forward from this year's OnePlus flagships, including the spring release of the OnePlus 8 Pro and the recently announced OnePlus 8T. These two models were powered by the Snapdragon 865 chipset, but rumors point to next year's release running on the as yet unannounced Snapdragon 875.

As discovered by Notebook Check, there are two Geekbench listings of phones that match the OnePlus 9 description, and the 1.8GHz, 8-core chip within the mystery phone appears to be the Snapdragon 875. If so, the scores are dramatically lower than you might expect.

The best results produced by the supposed OnePlus 9 show a single-core score of 1,122 and a multi-core score of 2,733 in Geekbench 5. While these single-core scores are an improvement over the numbers shown by OnePlus' recent flagships, the multicore results are worse than those shown by both the OnePlus 8T and OnePlus 8 Pro. The multicore scores for these models were 3,203 and 3,379, respectively.

The best results obtained in Geekbench 5 came from Apple's new iPhone, with the iPhone 12 mini recording a multicore score of 4,123. Needless to say, this is a much better result than the rumored OnePlus 9 posted on the Geekbench site.

We would caution against reading too much into these early benchmark numbers. Besides the fact that it is easy to post falsified numbers on sites, it is still early days for OnePlus' next phone. Early tests posted on benchmark sites often reflect early versions of both the phone and the components that run it. These results are from phones with 8GB of RAM, and if recent releases are any indication, OnePlus may have more memory. It is also possible that the Qualcomm chipset used in this early test was not optimized for maximum performance.

Another reason to avoid drawing conclusions from these numbers is that both the chipset and the phone on which it is mounted are still very much on the drawing board, assuming OnePlus sticks to its usual six-month pattern of rolling out new flagship phones, OnePlus 9 is likely to arrive sometime between March and April; the Snapdragon 875 is not likely to arrive until late 2020 at the earliest.

When Qualcomm announces its next-generation chips, we will likely hear about a number of improvements that go beyond performance. But on that front, we can expect to see improvements in performance, graphics speed, and energy efficiency over the Snapdragon 865, which will likely be reflected in future benchmarks.

As for the OnePlus 9, these early Geekbench results are closely related to a leaked CAD rendered image of the recently introduced new model. That leak suggests a larger display than the one OnePlus has on the 6.55-inch 8T and a screen with a faster refresh rate of 120Hz. Expect more information on the OnePlus 9 to begin to emerge as the New Year approaches.