Hardware Overview and System Functioning

The Xiaomi Mi half dozen is the commencement device I've received to review that'south powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, the electric current-generation flagship in Qualcomm's line-upwards. So let's talk a little about the new SoC and what it brings to smartphones.

In the CPU department, nosotros're looking at an upgrade from a 2+two quad-cadre pattern in the Snapdragon 820, to a 4+4 octa-core blueprint using new Kryo 280 CPU cores. The new Kryo 280 is not a derivative of the sometime Kryo core from the S820, instead being derived from the ARM Cortex-A73 which should bring improved IPC relative to final year's cadre design. Equally for clock speeds, nosotros're seeing ii.45 GHz on the high-functioning cluster, and ane.9 GHz on the efficient cluster.

The GPU has been upgraded from an Adreno 530 at 653 MHz (in the S821) to an Adreno 540 at 710 MHz. Most of the functioning improvement over terminal twelvemonth'due south SoC comes from the increased clock speed, notwithstanding Qualcomm has tweaked some aspects to the ALU which improves operation further. The company claims a 25 per centum boilerplate proceeds over the S820 in GPU operation.

We're also seeing a Hexagon 682 DSP, support for ten-scrap 4K HEVC encoding and decoding at 60 FPS, support for UFS 2.1 storage, support for Qualcomm Quick Accuse iv.0, and an LPDDR4X memory controller providing 29.eight GB/south of bandwidth. The manufacturing process used has also shrunk, from 14nm to Samsung's 10nm LPE.

Connectivity-wise the Snapdragon 835 supports a broad range of connectivity, and most of information technology has been implemented in the Xiaomi Mi 6. Nosotros're seeing Category 16 LTE downstream and Category 13 upstream for chiliad/150 Mbit/southward throughput respectively, thank you to the integrated X16 LTE modem. In that location's likewise Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/chiliad/north/ac support with 2x2 MIMO and Bluetooth 5.0, plus NFC in the Mi 6.

The Mi 6 includes a ludicrous 6 GB of RAM, which is mostly unnecessary for a smartphone. Actress RAM means more apps can exist stored in retentivity for quick re-opening, though for the most part I didn't notice a significant performance difference in app loading relative to devices with 4 GB of RAM in day to twenty-four hours tasks. There's also either 64 or 128 GB of internal NAND depending on how much you want to pay.

In general, the Xiaomi Mi 6 is an incredibly fast phone to use, and that's partly due to the very short animations Xiaomi has implemented. App loading is still extremely quick though, and the S835 helps brand this phone feel snappy throughout the OS and apps.

Looking at criterion information, what nosotros're seeing is a handy 31 percent atomic number 82 in CPU performance on average over the Snapdragon 821 in the LG G6. When comparing the S835 to the lower-clocked Snapdragon 820, that pb extends to a commendable 47 per centum. Of course, the S835 does include an actress four cores, just nigh Android applications only use a few threads and this is generally reflected beyond our benchmark suite.

Compared to other modern SoC platforms, the Snapdragon 835 comfortably beats the Exynos 8895 in the Samsung Milky way S8 (Exynos variants) by 24 percentage on average in CPU tests. The Exynos 8895 uses Samsung's ain Exynos M2 cores, and four of them clocked at ii.3 GHz in the high-performance cluster. The S835 is clocked only seven pct college, and so these gains come up mostly from architectural differences; Qualcomm's CPU designs tend to exist pretty solid.

Compared to the Kirin 960, which uses standard Cortex-A73 cores at up to 2.36 GHz, the S835 CPU is thirteen percent faster on average. The Kryo 280 cores are clocked around four per centum higher, so once more we're seeing Qualcomm's design efficiencies here.