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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Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
You're welcome to point out and name the actual tests you have problems with.Xiaomi has a history of cheating in benchmarks - I'm using obfuscated application IDs that circumvent such detection and thus the numbers published here represent the actual app performance of the phone.
Redmyth79 - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
I would love to challenge you on that as I'm a 1st time buyer of Xiaomi being the Mi 9.Again I've owned Galaxy S4-S9+ Note 9, LG G2-G4, V20-30, IPhone 6plus-8plus yet the Mi 9 makes small work of all them including the iPhone XS Max in performance!
I also have posted my results on my YouTube which that can't be cheated as I even video recorded a AuTuTu 8.02 system test which I got 440,701 and sense then I've gotten higher.
No BSing there
Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
I accept your challenge. You play the AnTuTu card, you lose.Ian Cutress - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
AnTuTu is the laughing stock of benchmarks. The minute someone tries to justify their position with an AnTuTu score, you know not to take them seriously.Korguz - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
if you really have owned all those phones, then either, you dont take care of them, and they get broken fast, and need to be replaced, you are one of those that HAS to upgrade for no reason other then for bragging rights, or, and this is tied in with the 2nd reason, more money then you know what to do with :-)Jon Tseng - Sunday, September 15, 2019 - link
No links yet to your supposed data?Cellar Door - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
The matter a fact here is that Andrei is the best and most technical phone reviewer for the past few years - yet here you are with anecdotal at best claims, and insulting tone.NXTwoThou - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
I finally gave up my Lumia 950 for a Mi9 8/256 this year for less than what I paid for my 950 back in the day. Xiaomi has some really odd things that go on as they have three main roms available and the bootloader can't be unlocked for a set period of time. Once you do unlock it, xiaomi.eu uses the china beta roms and strips out the China specific things, removes all ads, and finishes translation. My phone became a whole other beast after using the weekly xiaomi.eu roms. We got moved to Android 10 August 8th. OIS, waterproofing, and a non-slippery back are the only things I feel that need refinement.MrSpadge - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
Same here, finally switched from Lumia 950 to a Mi9. I've got two points to add:- I've toned the sharpening down one notch in the camera app, as it was producing halos around edges
- I've bought the international version after reading that the Ads can be disabled. First I had none, but after using it for 2-3 months annoying Ads started to pop up. It happens less than each day on average, but when it happens it's really annoying. You tip something and the phone does not react. Brain says "WTF" and after a short break (depending on network speed) the Ad is shown, sometimes as still image and sometimes as videos with loud sound (depending on your current setting). This interrupts the work flow and maybe also the environment and really, the least thing I'll do with whatever is advertised is to buy it. Already tried different ways to turn this off, depending on forum suggestions, but was not yet successful.
NXTwoThou - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
I've been on .eu rom since I was allowed to unlock. The only ads I've ever seen since are very random with the built in music app and cleaner. Neither of which I use often enough for it to be an annoyance. I don't see any sharpening settings in the built in camera app. Are you using GCam?