SE stands for “Speed Edition” and the phone lives up to its name in two ways – having a faster chipset and a faster display (than its sibling and the 9 Pro). For the former, the Realme 9 5G SE is powered by a Snapdragon 778G.

This is a bit of a surprise as even the Realme 9 Pro only offers a Snapdragon 695. This means the SE has double the number of Cortex-A78 based cores (four) and an Adreno 642L GPU (vs. 619). Based on previous experience with these chips, the SE will have a slightly faster CPU and much faster GPU compared to the Pro.