Look, I’m a performance enthusiast, but reports that Qualcomm is apparently preparing not one but two Snapdragon flagship chipsets for launch later this year is music to my ears. Not that I’m tired of the never-ending specs race (though it is somewhat less exciting these days), but when it comes to spending my hard-earned money on a new phone, I’m finding it increasingly hard to justify astronomical sums just to have the fastest chip on the market.
As cliché as it is to say, day-to-day performance is a solved problem for smartphones. Pick any flagship or even mid-range phone from the past three years, and it’ll doomscroll and churn through emails as good as any modern flagship. Google’s Pixel phones and Tensor processor combo are a prime example of cutting through the benchmark noise to provide good-enough performance. As an added bonus, the chip allows Google to offer seven years of software support, which is arguably even more important. In any case, whatever Qualcomm is cooking up will run laps around Tensor, but I’m far more concerned about how much it will cost rather than how much it wins by.