Happy weekend!
There has been a lot of news related to benchmarking lately, including an admission by Google that they blocked Play Store downloads of benchmarking apps during the Pixel 8 review embargo, as well as fresh chips coming down the pipeline by Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Discussion questions:
- Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
- Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
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They only matter when considering efficiency, throttling, and battery pife. If the next SoC has throttling, efficiency issues, i would not consider buying it. Smartphone SoCs have become plenty fast for regular everyday tasks (even midrange ones). It’s not a matter of “If it can?” Anymore as much as, how long? If you don’t get the fastest flagship, it will still do whatever tasks you throw at it (barring heavy gaming/emulation) just that much slower.
I have a smartphone with 6gb of ram and 6GB of virtual ram powered by dimensity 700. It’s still plenty fast for most tasks and light to medium gaming and does multitask well. It slows down, but only when throttling. The performance is sufficient. I will get another year out of this smartphone but will need to upgrade for security updates and increased ram(some LLMs need that much ram)