The Xiaomi Mi9 Review: Flagship Performance At a Mid-Range Price
by Andrei Frumusanu on September 13, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- Smartphones
- Xiaomi
- Snapdragon 855
- Xiaomi Mi9
Machine Learning Inference Performance
AIMark 3
AIMark makes use of various vendor SDKs to implement the benchmarks. This means that the end-results really aren’t a proper apples-to-apples comparison, however it represents an approach that actually will be used by some vendors in their in-house applications or even some rare third-party app.
In AIMark, the Mi9 offers the needed library support from Qualcomm for the benchmark to work. In terms of performance, the device ranks high, although it’s just slightly edged out by the rest of the Snapdragon 855 devices.
AIBenchmark 3
AIBenchmark takes a different approach to benchmarking. Here the test uses the hardware agnostic NNAPI in order to accelerate inferencing, meaning it doesn’t use any proprietary aspects of a given hardware except for the drivers that actually enable the abstraction between software and hardware. This approach is more apples-to-apples, but also means that we can’t do cross-platform comparisons, like testing iPhones.
We’re publishing one-shot inference times. The difference here to sustained performance inference times is that these figures have more timing overhead on the part of the software stack from initialising the test to actually executing the computation.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI CPU
We’re segregating the AIBenchmark scores by execution block, starting off with the regular CPU workloads that simply use TensorFlow libraries and do not attempt to run on specialized hardware blocks.
The CPU results in AI Benchmark are relatively mixed in terms of their positioning for the Mi9. In some of them, the Mi9 falls in amongst the last S855 devices, while in others, it more in the middle of the pack. Overall, this is just a matter of how the scheduler and DVFS is tuned on the Mi9. It’s to be noted that the differences between the devices here is very minor, with only a 10% difference between the best and worst Snapdragon 855 devices.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI INT8
In the INT8 tests which are accelerated on the SoC’s Hexagon DSP, we’re seeing the Mi9 lands in the middle of the pack again.
On the last “Cartoons” test running VGG-19, we’re seeing that the Mi9 is falling behind the rest of the pack alongside the LG G8. The reason for this is likely that the device is shipping with older NNAPI drivers than the rest of the Snapdragon 855 phones. The firmware we’ve tested this on was the latest at the time of testing in early September.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP16
In the FP16 tests the Mi9 again ends up middle of the pack.
AIBenchmark 3 - NNAPI FP32
Finally, the FP32 test running on the GPU ends up as the last Snapdragon 855 device in the pack, although again the differences here between the devices are very small, and it’s still performing vastly better than any other non-Snapdragon device.
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Shlong - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
Then disable your adblocker. Hard to pay the writers, server bills, when 70% of your users are ad blocking.PeachNCream - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
If a hypothetical 70% of your audience is blocking ads on the site you run, maybe it says more about the advertising than the site's visitors.valinor89 - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
I used to periodically disable the adblocker for this site, but each time I had to reenable it because sometimes it has obnoxious ads, autoplay videos, pop ups that hide content and what not.s.yu - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
Does this really work? Are you sure that it's the displays not the clicks that generate revenue? If it's the clicks might as well click all the ads once in a while and block them all when reading.Shlong - Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - link
So which sites don't have annoying advertising? I use adblock but for sites I frequently visit, I disable, like at Anandtech, Ars-Technica, and others.FunBunny2 - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
"Then disable your adblocker. Hard to pay the writers, server bills, when 70% of your users are ad blocking."that's a great gulp of Flavour Aid. think about it, for just a second. will folks who choose to conserve bandwidth (both on the innterTubes and their brains) by ad blocking be likely to ever, ever, ever click on such ads? the answer, of course, is never, never, never. IOW, the ad revenue driven sites are scamming the ad buyers, by 'selling eyes'. which is exactly the same way that print media went. and the innterTubes sites proclaimed that they were oh so new and disruptive. right.
sites have the tech to sell click-throughs, rather than eyes, but they're scared shitless to do that since the number is minuscule. not to pick on AT specifically, of course. all these sites have the same problem. if they did sell click-throughs then ad blocking is a non-issue, of course.
Qasar - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
sadly i use an ad blocker as well, i tried disabling it once, and man.. the ads are EVERYWHERE, makes most of the site practically unreadable. and the auto playing videos, are MOST annoying.Shlong - Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - link
They are annoying but if people continue to block the ads, Anandtech and similar sites won't be around for that much longer.Korguz - Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - link
then they should tone some of them down, or like some have asked, switch to a paid version with no ads.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - link
"Anandtech and similar sites won't be around for that much longer."once again: sell based on click-throughs and be done with it. selling 'eyes' is a total scam. in fact, selling click-throughs just might, might lead to better ads, not just more obnoxious ones. :)