Redmi Note 4 - Is the Snapdragon 625 Chipset Really That Powerful?

The Star Online in an article titled 'Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 pre-orders start March 10' (link) stated that "While the China variant features a Mediatek Helio X20 processor, Malaysian users will be getting the more powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core 2.0GHz processor instead." which begs the question is that really the truth or just a marketing gimmick? Let's find out then.

Benchmark scores are sourced from GSMArena & Primate Labs (*)

As can be seen in the table above, the Redmi Note 4 (SD625) scores are inferior to Redmi Note 3 (SD650) and Redmi Note 4 (X20) scores among popular benchmarks. The only exception comes from the Geekbench 4 (multi-core) score for the Redmi Note 3 as it only have 6 cores; "hexa", versus Redmi Note 4 (SD625) 8 cores; "octa", and Redmi Note 4 (X20) 10 cores; "deca".

While I acknowledged that higher synthetic benchmark scores doesn't translate to superior real-world usage, the fact that a major publication goes on to claim and lead the public into thinking that the phone is indeed more powerful than previous iterations is uncalled for. The reality that Xiaomi themselves talked more on the SD625's power-efficiency is already a big hint to all.