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The Smartphone CPU Review You NEED to Watch!

Geekerwan4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2023
YouTube
explainer · intermediate · 2022–2023 on HN

Geekerwan reviews smartphone CPUs by power efficiency rather than benchmark scores, with test methodology and chapters on Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and Google chips. It explains why high benchmark scores can coexist with heat and poor battery life.

HN people cite it as detailed data on mobile SoC efficiency, sustained performance and ARM core efficiency curves.

8 comments from Hacker News

@adithyassekhar2023-08 · in “ARM’s Cortex A710: Winning by Default”

Interesting that geekerwan found the exact opposite in their testing of A710 ▶ this video ARM efficiencies at 13:10. Granted these are across multiple chips. The whole video is a good watch.

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@Yoofie2023-05 · in “ARM’s Cortex A53: Tiny but Important”

Someone else posted a really compelling video where they test the power efficiency of Android and Apple phones. ▶ this video Its really quite informative.

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@jeroenhd2023-02 · in “Apple’s 2½ year old iPhone 12 is 6% faster than the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra”

This doesn't really showcase how much Apple's chips are as much as how far Qualcom has fallen behind. On the other hand, the results also show how much work Apple will need to put into their GPUs, as the clearly inferior chip is still beating the iPhone 14 hands down in terms of GPU horsepower. The relevant review, though, is performance per watt. This video ( ▶ this video ) from a few months ago explores the power efficiency graphs and that's probably what most phone users really want. Nobody is gaming on their phone until it hits the limits of passive cooling and very few people will need the raw CPU performance for more than a second per page load. I don't even know what intensive single core benchmarks are even good for in real life, maybe Javascript if you're somehow running the JS VM at 100% for minutes straight? That doesn't sound like something I'd want my phone to do! Qualcom's advancements in speed and longevity have been incremental, sometimes even decremental, for years now. Mediatek, previously the chipset for every 100 dollar Chinese phone, keeps closing while Qualcom desperately tries to squeeze just a little more juice out of their cores. Apple's progress is also slowing down, but not nearly as much as their most important competitor's. It's a shame, really. Hopefully Google and Microsoft will develop their own chips for real in the future because you can't just wait for Qualcom anymore. Microsoft REALLY wants a good M1/2 competitor but the other chips in the ARM s

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@GeekyBear2023-02 · in “Apple’s 2½ year old iPhone 12 is 6% faster than the new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra”

No, but there is evidence that Geekbench doesn't do a good job of measuring sustained performance. This video from Geekerwan takes more of a sustained performance / thermal throttling perspective. ▶ this video

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@nfriedly2023-05 · in “ARM’s Cortex A53: Tiny but Important”

Geekerwan on YouTube tests the performance and effiency of different cores at different frequencies. This is one good example where the A55 and A510 (successors to the A53) are graphed at around 15:40: ▶ this video