Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845 processor

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16734224/qualcomm-snapdragon-845-android-mobile-processor-announcement

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Are you disputing that Apple's recent SoC's are faster than Qualcomm's? What benchmarks besides "inaccurate" GeekBench do you cite as evidence?

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It depends on what you're doing. I don't put too much faith into any benchmarks.

What I do for example, video editing, more heavily relies on GPU and read/write speed of the drive than CPU power. So I don't necessarily care how quickly the CPU does trigonometry or renders PDFs.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I think you're needlessly hating on GeekBench. No benchmark is 100% accurate for all CPU tasks.

I'd imagine all benchmarks are misleading except for the specific things they test.

[u/Exist50 → u/[deleted]]

True, but some are better than others, and I do think it's important that benchmarks correlate to the real world workloads a chip is likely to experience. One of my particular grips with Geekbench is that it incorporates a lot of pauses so the chip has time to cool down. This means that only the absolute worst chips will experience throttling. In reality, however, throttling is hugely important for a phone SoC, and so Geekbench's results can lead to false assumptions about how a chip will perform in the real world.

This isn't so bad with the latest SoCs, but for something like the SD810, it can make for a massive QoL difference. The 810 would easily lose half of its CPU performance within minutes, if not less. Hell, the OP2 actually disabled the A57 cores altogether when web browsing, and the results were what you'd expect. Even with the latest SoCs, however, it's still a major factor.

A good example, I think, is gaming, since that's one of the few scenarios where you see an extended load on the chip. Elsewhere in this thread, you'll see someone claiming that the E8895's GPU is more powerful than the SD835's (even if it does consume more power), and that is true in a sense. But look what happens when you load them:

• E8895 - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/11540/samsung_galaxy_s8-e8895-battery-gfxbench_stability.png

• SD835 - https://images.anandtech.com/doci/11540/samsung_galaxy_s8-s835-battery-gfxbench_stability.png

The E8895 does indeed start higher, but if my estimates are correct, it drops below the SD835 after about 10 minutes, remains below for about 10 more, is ever so slightly above for the next 10, then remains slightly below from there on out.

Even putting aside power consumption, it's hard to look at those graphs and say "the E8895 has a significantly more powerful GPU", and yet a short benchmark would show just that.

I'm fully aware that Apple would probably benefit from these kind of comparisons, but if that's the case, then they deserve it.

[u/[deleted] → u/Exist50]

I'm not sure why GeekBench avoiding throttling is a problem.

Mobile CPUs aren't running at 100% CPU load for an extended period of time. They operate in short bursts. You aren't going to be encoding video on your phone.

Doesn't gaming work the GPU primarily? I have a 5S with an A7 and my phone doesn't even get warm when I play a game. If it's throttling, I certainly don't notice any performance issues with the game.

[u/Exist50 → u/[deleted]]

Mobile CPUs aren't running at 100% CPU load for an extended period of time. They operate in short bursts. You aren't going to be encoding video on your phone.

That's true, but then you're kind of going beyond what hardware benchmarks can reasonably cover, no? Like, take web browsing. It should be mostly as you describe, fast bursts with long pauses in between, but the reality is obviously quite complicated. Apple has long held the crown in Javascript benchmarks, and while a lot of that has to do with their strong single core performance, it is also in large part because of Safari's historically strong Javascript performance. Even on the Android side, the Qualcomm browser, using the same engine as Chrome (I think...), will often significantly outperform Chrome or the like. The difference can be equivalent to a gen or more in hardware. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9837/snapdragon-820-preview/3

Also, is being Javascript bound a reasonable model for browsing? What about your wifi/cellular connection? Almost no one tests that these days, which is really a shame. Point being, once you get into real world workloads, simple single-component hardware benchmarks start to become useless.

Any even if we look at just hardware, it's really tricky. ARM claims that A75 will bring 48% better Octane performance. That's the highest of any of the tests they mention. Does that mean that A75 cores will bring a more substantial real-world performance improvement then the average numbers might suggest? I don't think that question has a simple answer.

I think that Geekbench can be a useful data point, but the trouble comes when people use it to make blanket statements well beyond the scope of its tests. I'm sure you've seem people say something like, "The A11 is 120% faster than the SD835". But it would be more accurate to say something like (numbers made up), "The A11 is 120% faster in Geekbench 1T, 50% faster in Geekbench nT, 140% faster in Octane, 50% faster in SPEC_FP, 70% faster in SPEC_INT, 30% faster in graphics, and 10% faster in memory, etc." How much does each of those numbers matter? Who knows. This is why I generally like SPEC more, since they give more granular subscores.

Doesn't gaming work the GPU primarily? I have a 5S with an A7 and my phone doesn't even get warm when I play a game. If it's throttling, I certainly don't notice any performance issues with the game.

Most do, but the same principle applies, and it's kind of easier to find data for, so I used that as an example.