Given Qualcomm's leadership in the mobile GPU space and the constant growth of the Hexagon piece, I do think they're adding value to the equation there that competitors can't boast quite so loudly about. That makes it pretty clear ARM is the one driving the performance gains here, not Qualcomm. Any major real-world performance differences would then come down to optimization and increasingly common heterogeneous workloads that leverage not just the CPU, but the GPU and DSP (aka AI/neural/ML processors) on our phones to accomplish more complex, specialized tasks. That does tend to disillusion me toward any kind of narrative Qualcomm is pushing about its CPU being especially special, given Huawei's off-the-shelf A76 design appears to perform very similarly. The elephant in the room on the CPU side is Huawei's Mate20 Pro, which has seen its benchmark scores delisted by a number of sites due to allegations of "cheating." While we're not going to get into the politics of all that, looking at the scores that are out there, it does appear Qualcomm's new A76-based design holds a very slight speed edge over Huawei's own A76-derived Kirin 980 (we're talking sub-5% differences, though). We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation. Android Authority reports: Yesterday, AnandTech posted some information about 'weird beh. GPU performance seems more marginal in terms of improvement, though Qualcomm's Adreno chips are so far ahead of what Intel, Huawei, and MediaTek are able to package in this kind of power envelope that it's really just another extension of that lead - Qualcomm's operating a full generation or more ahead of the competition there. After this discovery, Geekbench has banned the OnePlus 9 and the OnePlus 9 Pro smartphones from its platform saying It’s disappointing to see OnePlus handsets making performance decisions based on application identifiers rather than application behaviour. Popular benchmark site Geekbench has removed OnePlus 9 benchmarks from its charts due to allegations that the company designed Oxygen OS optimization tools in such a way that they could be viewed as cheating. With its odd 1:3:4 CPU layout (one very big core, three big cores, four small cores), it seems Qualcomm - or as I'll discuss, ARM - has been able to close at least some of the gap it has traditionally been criticized for in comparison with Apple's chips. For those deeply concerned with single-core Geekbench scores, the Snapdragon 855 is without a doubt the most promising chip Qualcomm has released in years.
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