Opinion: Why does Xiaomi repeatedly use the Snapdragon 625?

Three. The Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime (review here), the Redmi Note 4X (review here), and the upcoming Xiaomi Mi Max 2. These phones all use the Snapdragon 625, an incredibly energy efficient SoC. Don’t get me wrong, the Snapdragon 625 is the perfect SoC for the Redmi 4 Prime, but for a Redmi Note or a Mi Max? That’s a tough sell.

Why? A “too long, didn’t read” summary would be; previous generation Redmis set such a difficult precedent to follow that these new generation Redmi devices are disappointing in comparison. The use of the Snapdragon 625 has many informed users holding off on upgrading, but these units are still selling like hotcakes, especially in India.

Even though informed/power users are disappointed by the downgrade in performance, I fear that Xiaomi has set the bar incredibly high again with the repeated use of the Snapdragon 625 (I’m sure you can guess what I’m talking about) and this could pose an issue for the next generation of phones.

Xiaomi sometimes creates device that are too amazing for its own good, and the hate against the Snapdragon 625 is exactly a result of that.

Xiaomi: The Bar is Too High

As previously mentioned, the incredibly high bar was set by none other than the Redmi Note 3 Pro. This phone imposed such an incredibly large precedent in price to performance that Xiaomi is hard pressed to continue in such a manner.

While the Redmi Note 3 Pro definitely had its fair share of criticisms, the value it represented was completely unparalleled, warping our expectations for future generations (the Redmi Note 4X).

I do understand why Xiaomi is using the Snapdragon 625 in so many of their phones though. Regular consumers by and large do not know the difference between a Snapdragon 625, 650, or 821. They care whether a phone is fast in practice and the most tech savvy of the bunch might hazard a glance at core count or clock speed.

To those who don’t live in our world, a 10 core Helio X20 seems like the obvious choice next to an 8 core Snapdragon 835. To a worldwide company like Xiaomi, the majority of their customer base thinks like that. Those of us who can differentiate between a Snapdragon 615 and 616 (who remembers the overheating issues with 615 chips?) are few and far between and while Xiaomi will try to do everything in their power to keep us, the vocal 1% happy, their priority is and always will be the 99%.

And thus the reason why Xiaomi uses the Snapdragon 625 in many of their phones.

Does Xiaomi care about us? Of course they do, but creating a smartphone means compromise, and disappointing a small but vocal portion of the internet in exchange for the benefits of using the Snapdragon 625 (and the massive volume discounts that must come from purchasing mountains of 625 chips) must really be the case of the pros outweighing the cons.

Xiaomi: Fan Response

I’ve read through countless forum threads and I see hate against the Snapdragon 625 expressed over and over again. However, I’ve seen a significant amount of comments defending the Snapdragon 625, saying the hate against the Snapdragon 625 comes from those who have not used it, because there have been few complaints about the performance.

While that statement remains unverified, it doesn’t seem outlandish given the 625 is more than fast enough for regular consumers.

Gizchina News of the week

Join GizChina on Telegram

However, in my opinion these commenters are missing the point. A downgrade is a downgrade is a downgrade, and those vocal enough to express their ire might not care that a Snapdragon 625 is fast enough for regular use, they are just disappointed that Xiaomi fell short of expectations. “How dare Xiaomi use the lowly Snapdragon 625 chip when they are REQUIRED to use a Snapdragon 652 class chip in the Mi Max 2!”

Even though the Snapdragon 625 is objectively slower than a Snapdragon 652 processor, many other factors drastically influence the real world performance. Factors like app libraries, OTA updates, and environmental factors (like temperature) all play a role in changing how fast a phone feels.

Nevertheless, I will concede a point to the angry mob; you can still feel a slight but noticeable speed difference between a Snapdragon 625 and Snapdragon 652. Even though the Snapdragon 625 can do everything a Snapdragon 650 can do, The 650 still does some things better.

Let’s flesh this out more; the positively ancient MTK6753 can run all the apps AND play the most intense Android games (right now) at 1080p with no stutter assuming the software was optimized correctly. Does that mean the MTK6753 is an acceptable chip for ALL consumers? Absolutely not, as the performance delta can be found elsewhere. Place a Maze Blade (MTK6753), Redmi Note 4X (Snapdragon 625), and Redmi Note 3 Pro (Snapdragon 650) side by side and you will see the difference between all three in UI lag, app launch lag time (especially this), and in general use.

Point being, the Snapdragon 625 is fast enough (while the older MTK6753 might not) for regular users not to notice, but informed consumers (I use this term to loosely lasso in any phone enthusiast) might be able to. That being said, I sincerely believe that showing a regular consumer a Snapdragon 625/650 app launch speed test wouldn’t be enough to incite a regular consumer to upgrade or complain, the Snapdragon 625 is fast enough.

Xiaomi: The Next High Bar

While Xiaomi has let many informed users down in terms of performance, its making up for that somewhat in the battery department. The Snapdragon 625 is probably the most power efficient phone SoC ever produced by Qualcomm (and MediaTek obviously) and this is very clearly reflected not only in Xiaomi phones but other notable examples like the Moto Z Play, Zenfone 3, etc. I do think this is less of an issue compared to the insane price to performance the Redmi Note 3 Pro manifested due to a couple of reasons;

SoC power efficiency trends upwards, meaning that newer generations of chips use less and less power for the same amount of performance.
The current Redmi incarnations get such incredible amounts of battery life that a slight decrease probably wouldn’t hurt any expectations. The Snapdragon 625 combined with a 4000mAh battery yields 3-5 day battery life easily, and I don’t think users or reviewers would begrudge a slight decrease in battery life.

With all that being said, I believe that Xiaomi will have to continue to tread carefully with the next generation of phones (not much else beats a 625 + >5000mAh battery). While it wouldn’t be too difficult to top our performance expectations with the next generation (considering the disappointment we felt this generation), they would have to make sure that battery life continues to be in the ballpark of what the Snapdragon 625 yields today.

Are you disappointed in Xiaomi’s use of the Snapdragon 625 in so many of their phones? What are your predictions for the next generation? Let us know in the comments down below!

Disclaimer: We may be compensated by some of the companies whose products we talk about, but our articles and reviews are always our honest opinions. For more details, you can check out our editorial guidelines and learn about how we use affiliate links.

About the author
Zi Jin Cheng
Just a guy incredibly passionate about technology, so much so that he started his own Youtube channel, check it out here!
www.youtube.com/c/zireviewstech

- princetom
  June 7, 2017
  Exactly. Using my mi max for another year, since it’s still faster than 625 anyway, why should i upgrade?
  - Flipp0
    June 10, 2017
    I also have Mi Max 1 I but will still update for the better design and build quality, stereo speakers, better battery life, vastly improved camera etc. IMO these things are more important than slightly faster loads speeds. SD625 is fast enough for me and things like build quality, sound and image quality is more important than a faster soc.
    - T-ReX
      January 24, 2018
      Dont be disappointed, as theres only a better battery life awaiting u. The other improvements are too small and unnoticeable to the average consumer, which is u
  - Allanitomwesh
    June 11, 2017
    They really shot themselves in the foot with the 625, the 652 phones are simply faster.

Yeti hand
June 7, 2017
is there a huge difference between the 660 and 625 in real life usage?? No
it all depend on the software optimisation.
it’s all good
- GoldenBoy
  June 7, 2017
  it could be a difference, like lags here and there or not fluent like a 660 could make.
  with a 5200 mAh battery you can fit a 660 easily.
  - Yeti hand
    June 8, 2017
    the lag here and there come from bad software optimisation, people always wants more more more, but most of the time more is useless unless you use your smartphone for bragging rights or nasa data compelling (lol). Even now I still don’t notice any difference between my mediapad x2 which processor is old as f””k and my xiaomi max. But people like to follow the trend :/
    - June 10, 2017
      That’s not true, even with optimization there is still more headroom on the SD652 vs the 625 as Lazar pointed out.
    - Lazar Prodanovic
      June 10, 2017
      That is called technology of technology in the philosophy & it pretty much pictures our current state…
    - T-ReX
      January 24, 2018
      Oh ok. You are the perect example of average consumer.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 7, 2017
  Huge difference, no. But there will be a noticeable enough difference that is detectable by some but not by others.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  Their is a huge difference between Integer operations of cortex A53 & A72 & it’s some 80~100% per MHz as the software isn’t tuned as it should the Integer operations are mostly used which translates into huge performance difference in the real use.
  - Yeti hand
    June 8, 2017
    nope, for facebook, instagram and whatever 80% of the applications the average customer use, there won’t be any difference.
    - Lazar Prodanovic
      June 8, 2017
      Honey two facts are; Integer operations are mostly used on Android & big core’s are 80~100% faster in integer loads. The which core & how gets chosen to execute which task is determined by HMP scheduler logic which is naturally pore configured by most OEM’s and costume ROM’s also. It’s rather complicated system & needs to be coherently configured.
      Read the documentation if you want…
      https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-bullhead-3.10-marshmallow-dr/Documentation/scheduler/sched-hmp.txt
    - T-ReX
      January 24, 2018
      Well maybe you are the average consumer. Why are you even here, go to facebook and post ur next pic
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Do u mean the 660?
  Or the 650?
  Anyways theres isnt much difference between 650 and 625 in todays games.
  But there sure is quite a noticable difference in graphics benchmarks
  The 660s is a next gen chip.Pretty sure theres gonna be noticeable performance increase in it vs 625

Louis
June 7, 2017
Using the same SD625 for the 3 phones might actually benefit in terms of software updates. A huge part of the work when developing, is the compatibility with the soc.
Usually, 3 teams would work on updates for 3 different phones. Now the 3 teams can work together for a big part of update, resulting in faster updates.
It might also give more reason for them too keep the devices up-to-date. With almost the same efforts they usually would have to do to support 1 device, they can now support 3 devices. Seeing how well these redmi and mi max series sell, they would satisfy a huge number of customers when providing regular updates.
Most budget phones don’t receive a lot of big updates, like android 6.0 –> android 7.0. That way, the company can keep the price of the device low by cutting the price in the software development department. Giving that all 3 the SD625 phones are budget phones, the volume discount and slightly cheaper soc’s might preserve some money to financiate further development for the devices.
While I personally also wouldn’t mind a chip with more performance, I don’t think the chose for the snapdragon 625 is that bad. The performance loss isn’t that big anyway, and better battery life is always a welcome bonus.
- June 8, 2017
  This is a good point. And to anyone other than us, these three phones are indeed very different
TATA MATA
June 7, 2017
I just want to encourage you guys at gizchina to write more articles lik this one. We also appreciate your personal opinion.
- June 7, 2017
  Yup, this was a lot of fun to write. Its just hard to come up with interesting ideas to write about.

Shuujirou
June 7, 2017
- princetom
  June 7, 2017
  Exactly. Using my mi max for another year, since it’s still faster than 625 anyway, why should i upgrade?
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
  Yup no reason
- Flipp0
  June 10, 2017
  I also have Mi Max 1 I but will still update for the better design and build quality, stereo speakers, better battery life, vastly improved camera etc. IMO these things are more important than slightly faster loads speeds. SD625 is fast enough for me and things like build quality, sound and image quality is more important than a faster soc.
- Allanitomwesh
  June 11, 2017
  They really shot themselves in the foot with the 625, the 652 phones are simply faster.
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Dont be disappointed, as theres only a better battery life awaiting u. The other improvements are too small and unnoticeable to the average consumer, which is u
Yeti hand
June 7, 2017
is there a huge difference between the 660 and 625 in real life usage?? No
it all depend on the software optimisation.
it’s all good
- Guest
  June 7, 2017
  it could be a difference, like lags here and there or not fluent like a 660 could make.
  with a 5200 mAh battery you can fit a 660 easily.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
  Huge difference, no. But there will be a noticeable enough difference that is detectable by some but not by others.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  Their is a huge difference between Integer operations of cortex A53 & A72 & it’s some 80~100% per MHz as the software isn’t tuned as it should the Integer operations are mostly used which translates into huge performance difference in the real use.
- Yeti hand
  June 8, 2017
  nope, for facebook, instagram and whatever 80% of the applications the average customer use, there won’t be any difference.
- Yeti hand
  June 8, 2017
  the lag here and there come from bad software optimisation, people always wants more more more, but most of the time more is useless unless you use your smartphone for bragging rights or nasa data compelling (lol). Even now I still don’t notice any difference between my mediapad x2 which processor is old as f””k and my xiaomi max. But people like to follow the trend :/
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  Honey two facts are; Integer operations are mostly used on Android & big core’s are 80~100% faster in integer loads. The which core & how gets chosen to execute which task is determined by HMP scheduler logic which is naturally pore configured by most OEM’s and costume ROM’s also. It’s rather complicated system & needs to be coherently configured.
  Read the documentation if you want…
  https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-bullhead-3.10-marshmallow-dr/Documentation/scheduler/sched-hmp.txt
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 10, 2017
  That’s not true, even with optimization there is still more headroom on the SD652 vs the 625 as Lazar pointed out.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 10, 2017
  That’s not true, even with optimization there is still more headroom on the SD652 vs the 625 as Lazar pointed out.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 10, 2017
  That is called technology of technology in the philosophy & it pretty much pictures our current state…
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Do u mean the 660?
  Or the 650?
  Anyways theres isnt much difference between 650 and 625 in todays games.
  But there sure is quite a noticable difference in graphics benchmarks
  The 660s is a next gen chip.Pretty sure theres gonna be noticeable performance increase in it vs 625
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Well maybe you are the average consumer. Why are you even here, go to facebook and post ur next pic
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Oh ok. You are the perect example of average consumer.
- Yeti hand
  February 23, 2018
  I just did it, did you like it 🙂
- T-ReX
  February 24, 2018
  Ill like it if you grow a brain, and understand the differences between a 660 n 625.
- Yeti hand
  February 24, 2018
Rahul R
June 7, 2017
I think you are missing the point…650 or 652 performs better only on opening apps or stuff like that(that too not too significant), if you play hd games, redmi note 3 (i am have it) loads faster than redmi note 4(snapdragon 625 i am using this to compare it with my phone), but 15+ mins into the game, frame drops and thermal issues kick in whether it is 650 or 652(leeco le 2)…. but 625 continuous the way it is …i really like the article to much more indepth than this vague….
- June 8, 2017
  My point is that to some people opening apps is more important than gaming. For example, I value app opening speed much more than gaming because I don’t play intense games on my phones, only casual ones.
  - Lazar Prodanovic
    June 8, 2017
    You would be surprised how bad job Xiaomi is doing with eMMC IO processing on both (file system & IO governor) ends. It almost can be doubled by use of up to date CAF along with switching to FIOPS/deadline & F2FS. To be honest this matters more than pure CPU in apps launching (especially IO latency).
    - June 10, 2017
      UFS2.0 storage would be a brute force solution to that wouldn’t it.
      And I don’t know enough about this topic to have an informed conversation with you, but I’ve seen a lot worse, especially on cheap laptops.
      - Lazar Prodanovic
        June 10, 2017
        Well you see it’s not about only what type of eMMC you use but also how you use it. For user experience more important part is latencies & response time all together with asynchronous R/W performance. & no UFS alone is not a big step forward, NAND type used is much more important especially on unbuffered & without much dyes (parallelism) implementation as they all are on mobiles. Switching to 3DXpoint will bring noticeable increases in performance but I am afraid we will have to wait considerably more amount of time until Micron makes it available for a mobile space…
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  Well I need at least a half of hour to drop the A510 to a 450 MHz from 600 as the cause of thermal throttling which still makes it faster than Adreno on the S625, which doesn’t throttle at all as it uses only 40% power of the A510 one (⅓ smaller & based on 42% less power consuming process). You are very wrong about CPU part; when ever big A72 core’s kick in on the S65x they are faster 60~80% then A53’s on the S652. We control how & when they kick in on both SoC litherations by HMP (kernel tunables). At the end it’s possible to make a S65x as efficient as S625 (at least how Xiaomi uses it) & still faster in real usage.
  - Rahul R
    June 8, 2017
    nope, i am talking abt real world usage, and i have both phones and also have compared the same with leco le2(for exact reason I gave way this phone) which used 652 which heats (you dont have to play hd games for it to get warm and just after that you play asphalt you can easily catch drop frames(…i am not talking abt the theory I am talking abt the real life usage…you can check it either… also there will be ton of videos that is out there that shows what i just said…..!!! there are thermal apps that shows that and on redmi note 3(snapdragon 650) how many times phones thermal gets above 45 and phones ask us to cool down when you play any hd games is there to see!!!
    - Lazar Prodanovic
      June 9, 2017
      I have Mi Max, it never gets that hot.
      Used Xenowerk to on top 60 FPS to get it throttling & it still needs good 30+ minutes for it. & it’s as I described on MiUI which doesn’t use any hotplug. On costume ROM’s it’s possible to stop GPU throttling on both S65x at 550 MHz… Real world just eaten you.
      - Yeti hand
        June 9, 2017
        Maybe cuz the mix max is huge and the leeco uses thicker material therefore the heat dissipates way better, I bought the leeco le2 to my girl friend, YES it does become hot so YES Rahul is right
        
        Lazar Prodanovic
        June 9, 2017
        Yup same goes for LeEco firmware (even worse) but that is the OEM fault. It’s rather manageable with proper config. & Raul still ain’t right because S65x with throttling GPU is still faster than S625 with one that doesn’t, in games naturally.
        
        Yeti hand
        June 9, 2017
        Raul’s talking about the heat and its consequence, I’m quite surprised you’re still trying to argue didn’t I say software optimisation plays a huge role then you came out of no where saying no it’s not the case and now suddenly you bring it back in the conversation?? Ok
        Here is real life conclusion, the leeco le2 become hot very often and then lags, when I noticed that I send it back and got a refund, would it be the case with better software?? No therefore it’s time to accept that 625 or 660 MEH, as long as the software if acceptable nobody should care because in reality more doesn’t anything for the average user
        
        Lazar Prodanovic
        June 9, 2017
        Let me brake it out to you; S65x series is capable of containing performance up to 1.4~1.6GHz (still it’s insane to go over 1.4 on 28nm HPM because leaking becomes huge) on two A72 core’s (depending of the device direct capabilities to spread the heat), on the S652-S653 if their is no core plugging mechanism (hotplug) & all big core’s are running on the high load it will fall down to 1017MHz which is pretty much the case with both OEM’s mentioned hire. How ever with clever use of the hotplug (so that it uses first & third core’s as idling one’s on big cluster) it’s possible to rise performance bar up 10% in comparation to S650. Now in the best bet real world performance projections the A72 running at 1.4GHz is equivalent to A53 running at 2.5~2.6GHz (considering it’s integer performance & that it’s 1.8x indexed for A72), if you go for a not the best one things get worse for A53 as integer operations don’t scale good in SMP. Regarding A510 GPU performance it drops to sustained 450MHz (with proper hotplug and cpu governor settings it’s possible to push this up to 550MHz). This is still more than Adreno on S625 can peak archive.
        I don’t understand the scheduler & governor tuning as “software optimisations”, they are there to partially compensate for a bad written one (in user space) & only if properly configured. Trough is that I unfortunately don’t know any OEM that makes it right (to the end) regarding this & this is actually a sad picture we get as an user experience end.
        Their is much more to it but I really don’t have that much time nor it is worth of it.
        
        Yeti hand
        June 9, 2017
        Again with the technical talk yet when it comes to real life usage… :/
        Lazar Prodanovic
        June 10, 2017
        I thought we are taking about tech hire…
        Yeti hand
        June 12, 2017
        My bad then, I only seek what is useful for my daily life
        T-ReX
        January 24, 2018
        Hello daily life talking, no overheating on sd 650 here.
        
        June 10, 2017
        Where do you live lazar? That has a huge impact on overheating. I believe indian users are much more susceptible to overheating than many other countries, so much so that even the SD652 had wide reports of overheating in India.
        Lazar Prodanovic
        June 10, 2017
        In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina & templates hire go from +40°C to – 25°C but that is not a point, point is bad firmware (kernel) optimization’s of scheduling logic along with abstinence of hot pluging implementation from most OEM’s (not just Xiaomi & LeEco but & big & famous one’s as Samsung) which all together lead to bad real life usage & with it together to bad user experience, but you get 3% better results in benchmarks that way & UI is a tad faster. Things aren’t much better on the costume arena front either for instance LineageOS disabled core_ctl hotplug on the all official builds in the past two months (because some other memory hanging issues)… All in all when you look at some scheduling “optimization’s” from both OEM’s and community you don’t know would you cry or laugh.
    - T-ReX
      January 24, 2018
      My redmi note 3 never asked for a ‘cool down’, playing 2-3 hours of nfs no limits. No lags either. The 652 might have some problems as there are two more big cores, which adds to the thermal gain.

Louis
June 7, 2017
Using the same SD625 for the 3 phones might actually benefit in terms of software updates. A huge part of the work when developing, is the compatibility with the soc.
Usually, 3 teams would work on updates for 3 different phones. Now the 3 teams can work together for a big part of update, resulting in faster updates.
It might also give more reason for them too keep the devices up-to-date. With almost the same efforts they usually would have to do to support 1 device, they can now support 3 devices. Seeing how well these redmi and mi max series sell, they would satisfy a huge number of customers when providing regular updates.
Most budget phones don’t receive a lot of big updates, like android 6.0 –> android 7.0. That way, the company can keep the price of the device low by cutting the price in the software development department. Giving that all 3 the SD625 phones are budget phones, the volume discount and slightly cheaper soc’s might preserve some money to financiate further development for the devices.
While I personally also wouldn’t mind a chip with more performance, I don’t think the chose for the snapdragon 625 is that bad. The performance loss isn’t that big anyway, and better battery life is always a welcome bonus.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
  This is a good point. And to anyone other than us, these three phones are indeed very different
TATA MATA
June 8, 2017
I just want to encourage you guys at gizchina to write more articles lik this one. We also appreciate your personal opinion.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
  Yup, this was a lot of fun to write. Its just hard to come up with interesting ideas to write about.

Shuujirou
June 8, 2017
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
Rahul R
June 8, 2017
I think you are missing the point…650 or 652 performs better only on opening apps or stuff like that(that too not too significant), if you play hd games, redmi note 3 (i am have it) loads faster than redmi note 4(snapdragon 625 i am using this to compare it with my phone), but 15+ mins into the game, frame drops and thermal issues kick in whether it is 650 or 652(leeco le 2)…. but 625 continuous the way it is …i really like the article to much more indepth than this vague….
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 8, 2017
  My point is that to some people opening apps is more important than gaming. For example, I value app opening speed much more than gaming because I don’t play intense games on my phones, only casual ones.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  You would be surprised how bad job Xiaomi is doing with eMMC IO processing on both (file system & IO governor) ends. It almost can be doubled by use of up to date CAF along with switching to FIOPS/deadline & F2FS. To be honest this matters more than pure CPU in apps launching (especially IO latency).
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 8, 2017
  Well I need at least a half of hour to drop the A510 to a 450 MHz from 600 as the cause of thermal throttling which still makes it faster than Adreno on the S625, which doesn’t throttle at all as it uses only 40% power of the A510 one (⅓ smaller & based on 42% less power consuming process). You are very wrong about CPU part; when ever big A72 core’s kick in on the S65x they are faster 60~80% then A53’s on the S652. We control how & when they kick in on both SoC litherations by HMP (kernel tunables). At the end it’s possible to make a S65x as efficient as S625 (at least how Xiaomi uses it) & still faster in real usage.
- Rahul R
  June 9, 2017
  nope, i am talking abt real world usage, and i have both phones and also have compared the same with leco le2(for exact reason I gave way this phone) which used 652 which heats (you dont have to play hd games for it to get warm and just after that you play asphalt you can easily catch drop frames(…i am not talking abt the theory I am talking abt the real life usage…you can check it either… also there will be ton of videos that is out there that shows what i just said…..!!! there are thermal apps that shows that and on redmi note 3(snapdragon 650) how many times phones thermal gets above 45 and phones ask us to cool down when you play any hd games is there to see!!!
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 9, 2017
  I have Mi Max, it never gets that hot.
  Used Xenowerk to on top 60 FPS to get it throttling & it still needs good 30+ minutes for it. & it’s as I described on MiUI which doesn’t use any hotplug. On costume ROM’s it’s possible to stop GPU throttling on both S65x at 550 MHz… Real world just eaten you.
- Yeti hand
  June 9, 2017
  Maybe cuz the mix max is huge and the leeco uses thicker material therefore the heat dissipates way better in the max, I bought the leeco le2 to my girl friend, YES it does become hot so YES Rahul is right
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 9, 2017
  Yup same goes for LeEco firmware (even worse) but that is the OEM fault. It’s rather manageable with proper config. & Raul still ain’t right because S65x with throttling GPU is still faster than S625 with one that doesn’t, in games naturally.
- Yeti hand
  June 9, 2017
  Raul’s talking about the heat and its consequence, I’m quite surprised you’re still trying to argue didn’t I say software optimisation plays a huge role then you came out of no where saying no it’s not the case and now suddenly you bring it back in the conversation?? Ok
  Here is real life conclusion, the leeco le2 become hot very often and then lags, when I noticed that I send it back and got a refund, would it be the case with better software?? No therefore it’s time to accept that 625 or 660 MEH, as long as the software if acceptable nobody should care because in reality more doesn’t anything for the average user
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 9, 2017
  Let me brake it out to you; S65x series is capable of containing performance up to 1.4~1.6GHz (still it’s insane to go over 1.4 on 28nm HPM because leaking becomes huge) on two A72 core’s (depending of the device direct capabilities to spread the heat), on the S652-S653 if their is no core plugging mechanism (hotplug) & all big core’s are running on the high load it will fall down to 1017MHz which is pretty much the case with both OEM’s mentioned hire. How ever with clever use of the hotplug (so that it uses first & third core’s as idling one’s on big cluster) it’s possible to rise performance bar up 10% in comparation to S650. Now in the best bet real world performance projections the A72 running at 1.4GHz is equivalent to A53 running at 2.5~2.6GHz (considering it’s integer performance & that it’s 1.8x indexed for A72), if you go for a not the best one things get worse for A53 as integer operations don’t scale good in SMP. Regarding A510 GPU performance it drops to sustained 450MHz (with proper hotplug and cpu governor settings it’s possible to push this up to 550MHz). This is still more than Adreno on S625 can peak archive.
  I don’t understand the scheduler & governor tuning as “software optimisations”, they are there to partially compensate for a bad written one (in user space) & only if properly configured. Trough is that I unfortunately don’t know any OEM that makes it right (to the end) regarding this & this is actually a sad picture we get as an user experience end.
  Their is much more to it but I really don’t have that much time nor it is worth of it.
- Yeti hand
  June 9, 2017
  Again with the technical talk yet when it comes to real life usage… :/
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 10, 2017
  Where do you live lazar? That has a huge impact on overheating. I believe indian users are much more susceptible to overheating than many other countries, so much so that even the SD652 had wide reports of overheating in India.
- Zi Jin Cheng
  June 10, 2017
  UFS2.0 storage would be a brute force solution to that wouldn’t it.
  And I don’t know enough about this topic to have an informed conversation with you, but I’ve seen a lot worse, especially on cheap laptops.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 10, 2017
  In Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina & templates hire go from +40°C to – 25°C but that is not a point, point is bad firmware (kernel) optimization’s of scheduling logic along with abstinence of hot pluging implementation from most OEM’s (not just Xiaomi & LeEco but & big & famous one’s as Samsung) which all together lead to bad real life usage & with it together to bad user experience, but you get 3% better results in benchmarks that way & UI is a tad faster. Things aren’t much better on the costume arena front either for instance LineageOS disabled core_ctl hotplug on the all official builds in the past two months (because some other memory hanging issues)… All in all when you look at some scheduling “optimization’s” from both OEM’s and community you don’t know would you cry or laugh.
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 10, 2017
  Well you see it’s not about only what type of eMMC you use but also how you use it. For user experience more important part is latencies & response time all together with asynchronous R/W performance (then output/bandwidth). & no UFS alone is not a big step forward, NAND type used is much more important especially on unbuffered & without much dyes (parallelism) implementation as they all are on mobiles. Switching to 3DX point (or any of the new NV-RAM technologies currently in development for that matter) will bring noticeable increases in performance but I am afraid we will have to wait considerably more amount of time until Micron makes it available for a mobile space…
- Lazar Prodanovic
  June 10, 2017
  I thought we are taking about tech hire…
- Yeti hand
  June 13, 2017
  My bad then, I only seek what is useful for my daily life
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  My redmi note 3 never asked for a ‘cool down’, playing 2-3 hours of nfs no limits. No lags either. The 652 might have some problems as there are two more big cores, which adds to the thermal gain.
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  Hello daily life talking, no overheating on sd 650 here.

Fox Hunter
June 8, 2017
Xiaomi should use mediatek or their own surge s1 instead of patent troll qualcomm garbage. We should all boycott patent trolls like intel and qualcomm. None of my phones use qualcomm chips, i only buy mediatek for now. All Redmi phones and Redmi note phones should abandon qualcomm and use the Surge S1 from Xiaomi. I dont care about gaming, i have a nintendo 3ds for that.
- The Surge S1 only has entry level performance though, you should go with Huawei
- T-ReX
  January 24, 2018
  The 3ds has even lower graphics than a low end snapdragon gpu. Some gamer you are..

fido futte
June 8, 2017
June 8, 2017
I had the Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime for awhile with SD 430. Now I have the 4 Prime with SD 625. A simple solitaire game I play occasionally lags a bit now and then on 4 Prime but never did on the 3S Prime. Can’t understand that.
- June 8, 2017
  Lag on the 625? Its definitely slower than flagships but I’ve never seen lag on simple games like that.
  - June 8, 2017
    It only does it about once in 10 game plays. Sometimes a card will lag a split second, sometimes the sound lags behind the movement of a card.
    - Louis Mario
      June 9, 2017
      maybe because of its FHD display, i’ve read that 4x with a 720p one runs smoothly some heavy games like GTA, obviously not at full graphics.

Xiaomi: The Bar is Too High

Xiaomi: Fan Response

Gizchina News of the week

Xiaomi: The Next High Bar

Are you disappointed in Xiaomi’s use of the Snapdragon 625 in so many of their phones? What are your predictions for the next generation? Let us know in the comments down below!

Zi Jin Cheng

Today in Home