Starting off with GeekBench, a benchmark that helps narrowly assess the CPU performance, we find that the Redmi Note 4 lags behind the Redmi Note 3 by a good margin. While the RN3 was a powerful mid-ranger at its best performance, the RN4 is an efficient mid-range device at best.
It trails behind in several benchmarks against its predecessor, which is inline with our initial assessment of the spec sheet. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 settles in the low and mid end with regards to benchmark performance. So how exactly does the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 fare? CPU & System While that advantage also translate to better performance under similar conditions, it’s largely offset by the difference in core setups. The area that would be an improvement is battery life, as the SD625 SoC also stands to benefit from the 14nm fabrication process as against the SD650’s 28nm process. The lack of A72 cores will also impact benchmark scores. The removal of the Cortex-A72 cores should be best felt in performance-intensive scenarios as opposed to daily usage cases where the Cortex-A53 cores should be sufficient, although some quick burst operations will likely take a hit in performance as well.
It’s claimed that the cluster setup is supposed to be divided into a performance (4x cores) and efficiency (4x cores) combination (as intended), but in the real world we routinely saw that all 8 cores were capable of reaching the 2.0GHz peak clock speed and staying there, so we are inclined to believe that the clusters are implemented rather homogeneously. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 bears 8x Cortex-A53 cores on a 14nm fabrication process. However, on the surface, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (Snapdragon 625) lands up behind the Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon 650) based on pure specifications. The Redmi Note 3 put up an absolutely untouchable wall of performance against its competition within the affordable segment, a fact that largely contributed to it being Xiaomi’s most successful product in the Indian market. The addition of 2x Cortex-A72 cores in a separate performance cluster supplemented the 4x Cortex-A53 cores in the efficiency cluster, allowing the device to ace various benchmarks with ease. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 (Snapdragon 650) that we reviewed left us mightily impressed by the sheer performance of the SoC in both processing speed and power efficiency, in both benchmarks and the real world.