The Xiaomi Mi Note Pro recently went on sale in Asia, and now that we got a unit in our hands, we were curious to check what the performance looks like, and it was a good surprise: as it stands, the Xiaomi Mi Note Pro is the fastest Snapdragon 810 powered phone on the market, besting the HTC One M9, LG G4 and LG G Flex 2 in nearly all benchmarks. It also outperforms the mighty Galaxy S6 on occasions. Here are the raw numbers:
In case you are not familiar with the benchmarks, Geekbench tries to measure main processor horsepower, Basemark OS looks at the overall system performance, and both 3DMark and GFXBench are gaming benchmarks.
As far as I know, Qualcomm is using the exact same chip, so I suppose that the extra performance comes from software work that comes from Qualcomm and Xiaomi, since Qualcomm typically provides a large code-base, while the OEM has final say on what gets in, and may be able to make modifications on their own.
There are a few things that can be tweaked to make things run faster. For graphics/game benchmarks, it is clear that driver work can bring substantial performance. We’ve seen this both on Mobile and on PC, so we know it can happen.
For CPU-driven benchmarks like Geekbench, it’s not really clear why they would go faster, but it could be better thermal controls, cache settings, etc… I’m a bit surprised to be honest, but the scores show a noticeable difference. For more data, check our Mi Note Pro vs. LG G4 comparison.
The good news is that all Snapdragon 810 phones could probably be optimized (to a degree) to hit higher levels of performance from where they were in March 2015. That’s really up to each OEM to see if their specific configuration lends itself to further optimizations.
Incidentally, our data also shows that the combination of high-performance and relatively affordable pricing (about $530, no contract) makes it one of the best performance/value proposition at the high-end of the performance spectrum. As you can see below, it provides an excellent performance for the money, and that’s particularly true if you want to play complex 3D games on Android.
Filed in . Read more about Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Snapdragon 810 and Xiaomi.