Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S Review

Performance

Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S is equipped with the current market's top chipset - the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 platform, built after the 2nd generation 10LLP FinFETT process from Samsung. It is the first system-on-chip to use the DynamIQ big.LITTLE CPU architecture. The CPU consists of four 2.8GHz Kryo 385 (gold) cores and four 1.8GHz Kryo 385 (silver) cores. The first are derivatives of ARM's Cortex-A75 cores and the second - of ARM's Cortex-A55 cores. Qualcomm has said that the CPU provides an average of 25% increase in performance compared to the Snapdragon 835 which houses four 2.45GHZ Kryo 280 cores and four 1.90GHz Kryo 280 cores. A 710MHz Qualcomm Adreno 630 GPU manages the graphics department and promises up to 30% increased performance and 30% increased power efficiency compared to the Adreno 540 GPU on the Snapdragon 835. The Snapdragon 845 also employs the new Hexagon 685 DSP that offers a tri-fold improvement in AI performance and neural network processing tasks. It can drive 4K screens or dual 2400 x 2400 displays at 120Hz in VR headsets. It also supports 6-axis DoF tracking for VR headsets. It can playback 4K HDR videos in Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HLG (Hybrid Log Gamma). The mobile platform on Mi MIX 2S is paired with 6GB/8GB of LPDDR4X RAM clocked at 1866MHz. There UFS 2.1 storage measures 64GB/128GB/256GB. Our review unit employs 6GB of RAM and 64GB of built-in memory. In terms of AnTuTu result, our review unit takes the top places in most benchmark tests. It outperforms the Exynos 9 9810-powered Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+, the Kirin 970-powered Honor V10, and the Snapdragon 835-powered Xiaomi Mi 6, Mi MIX 2, OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T. The 6.x.x AnTuTu score is 231654 points and the 7.x.x AnTuTu score measures 272401 points. The single-core result from the Geekbench 4 test is lower than the one of the Exynos 9810 but higher than the other competitors. The multi-core result takes the top place but outperforms only by a little the Exynos 9. The RenderScript score from the Geekbench 4 Compute test almost doubles the points from Snapdragon 835 results. The Basemark OS II result is the highest one from all devices we've tested but the Basemark ES 3.1 result yields to the one of the Galaxy S9 and S9+, which are powered by the Exynos 9810. The GFX Bench test could not run properly on our review unit and only the low-level tests went through. As long as it concerns the 3DMark tests, the Snapdragon 845 on our review unit significantly outperforms the Snapdragon 835, Exynos 9810 and Kirin 970 that power high-end smartphones we have reviewed. The same applies for the PCMark Work 2.0 and Computer vision scores. The PCMark Storage score is second best after the one of the Huawei Honor V10. The Androbench results are a mixed bag - some are lower, others are a bit higher or on par with the results from the other smartphones with UFS 2.1 type of storage.