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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
96 Comments
View All Comments
jaju123 - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
Nice review. Would be very interested in a Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro review if you manage to get your hands on it. Seems to be an upgrade on some aspects of this phone.Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
Among the upcoming reviews, iPhone 11, Mate 30, Pixel 4 in the foreseeable future I don't think we'll have time for the Mi9T Pro, sorry.yeeeeman - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
Why not Galaxy s10 with exynos 9825? Pixel 4 has Qualcomm 855 which we know. Huawei mate 30 will have Kirin 980 which again we know. iPhone is interesting, sure, but 9825 being a shrink it is curious to see what the impact is. Come on, it is launched for over a month now....Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
We're not getting sampled by Samsung so we'd have to buy one. Currently the 9825 doesn't represent any notable performance difference, the Note10 doesn't have any notable camera differences, so other than the chip's power efficiency for an academic view on 7EUV it's lower on the priority list than the aforementioned new devices.s.yu - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
Maybe you could lend one :)s.yu - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
sorry borrow XDjaju123 - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
No worries, I'm interested in those devices too so should be interesting!AkiraAkimoto - Saturday, September 14, 2019 - link
Will you review the latest Vivo flagship Nex 3 and the Xiaomi's flagship Mixα？Rumor says that the Mix series will have a great leap comparing with the previous Xiaomi deviceRedmyth79 - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
This site is not accurate so the 9Tpro would never get a fair shake. Trust me I own a lot of the phone es tested including the Mi 9. The Mi 9 test higher then the 9Tpro also so you know but the scores hear are apparently made to make them not look up to par with the other Flagship phones with 855 chip sets. Hell the 980 Kirin is from last year on the P30 pro and I know for a fact in 99% of test it doesn't come close to any 855 chipped phone much less a Mi 9 that truthfully on any other site including a lot of the actual test here it best out 99.9% of the phone es and the S10+ actually does about the worse of any but here some how it's rated near the top and the mi 9 is no where near where it should be. It's a crying shame.Cellar Door - Friday, September 13, 2019 - link
This site should get mods for troll account like this.