Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite Review

Performance

Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite is based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 MSM8976 Plus, which is an upgrade of the Snapdragon 653. Ever since its announcement in the spring of 2017, this chipset has found its way on a total of 59 smartphones up to this moment. It uses the 14nm LPP (Low Power Plus) process and emancipates mid-range and upper-mid-range smartphones by providing them with flagship performance capabilities. It houses eight semi-custom Kryo 260 CPU cores. The first cluster of four (Cortex-A73) is clocked at 2.2GHz and the other four cores (Cortex-A53) tick at 1.84GHz. They provide up to 20% increase in performance compared to the Snapdragon 653 CPU. An Adreno 512 GPU clocked at 650MHz manages the graphics department and offers a 30% increase in GPU performance compared to the Adreno 510. It supports Vulkan 1.0, OpenGL ES 3.2 (3.1 + AEP), OpenCL 2.0 Full, OpenGL 3.1, and Direct3D 12. On this chipset, you'll also find the Hexagon 680 DSP with Hexagon Vector eXtensions (HVX) supported for the first time in the SD600 tier and the Qualcomm All-Ways Aware sensor hub. The Snapdragon 660 packs all this as a hardware in what Qualcomm calls Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE), which is complemented by AI software features to deliver flagship performance and power efficiency to mid- and higher mid-range smartphones. As long as it concerns RAM+storage capacity, Xiaomi Mi 8 Lite has three variants: 4GB+64GB (available only for the black colour version), 6GB+64GB, 8GB+128GB. The RAM is double-channel, LPDDR4X, clocked at 1866MHz. The storage is of the eMMC 5.1 type and can be expanded. We are reviewing a 4GB+64GB unit. Of the 64GB on board the device, 49GB are available to the user. The Snapdragon 660 has gained more recognition this year instead of in 2017 when it has been announced. We have reviewed the Xiaomi Mi Note 3 (one of the first models to get it), Smartisan Nut Pro 2 and the Elephone U Pro, Xiaomi Mi A2 so we have a decent base for performance comparison. If we have to compare the chipset in general, the results from the benchmark tests are close to those of devices based on the Snapdragon 820 chipset. Our Mi 8 Lite review unit is our top performing smartphone with a Snapdragon 660 AIE chipset. It scores the highest results from the AnTuTu 6.x.x and AnTuTu 7.x.x tests, from the multi-core Geekbench 4 and Basemark OS II tests, and from the 3DMark Sling Shote and Ice Storm tests. The results from the GFXBench and PCMark tests are comparable to the best ones. The PCMark Storage and Androbench scores are slightly above average for the eMMC 5.1 type of built-in memory.