An odd Geekbench 4 Shootout: BLOD Nexus 6P vs i686 vs budget Moto E6

A bit of background info, and for those not in the know, the Nexus 6P was probably the Android phone ever made, hitting a trifecta enthusiast features, premium feel, and budget, hence why I kept mine despite upgrading several phones. Even still, the performance is still snappy (or was, more on that later), the screen is a gorgeous 1440p OLED, front-facing stereo, headphone jack, USB-C, and the camera still holds up well. Unfortunately, it suffered some major defects, including a major battery drain issue (killing the battery in 2 hours), and the BootLoop of Death (BLOD). My Nexus 6P experienced the battery issue, and a simple replacement seemed to resolve that last year. This week, it abruptly shut off, and bootlooped - I couldn’t even boot into recovery - my Nexus suffered the infamous Boot Loop of Death. The Nexus 6P uses the Snapdragon 810 SoC, the first utilizing big.LITTLE configuration, using clusters of high-performance cores and low-power high-efficiency cores. The exact cause of the BLOD is unknown, but occurs whenever the big cores are engaged, so a workaround involves patching the recovery, boot image, and kernel to use the little cores exclusively, effectively disabling the big cores.

I was able to revive my Nexus with said fixes, but as a result, I’ve noticed performance to be somewhat choppy - a stutter in animations, a little microfreezes, and overall just longer load times. So I wanted to see how bad the performance is in metrics, and compare it two other devices I have that struggle with performance these days: my Moto G6, and a Thinkpad X60s running a Core Duo L2400 (i686 1.66GHz dual), 2GB of RAM, and Debian 10 w/ LXQt. I used Geekbench 4.4.2 as that is the latest that will run on either the Moto G6 and my ThinkPad (presumably because they are 32bit).

First up the Moto G6 as a baseline:

Now the Thinkpad:

The poor old IBM ThinkPad put up an admirable fight in the single core, but no match the Moto E’s 8 low power cores. Now let’s see how the BLOD Nexus 6P fares with it’s dominant arm tied behind it’s back:

The little cores of the Nexus are indeed the littlest and weakest cores in this contest - my, how the mighty have fallen. Even so, the 4 little cores out muscle the Core Duo’s 2 cores. Here are comparisons to typical Nexus 6p devices:


Surprisingly, the multicore score doesn’t suffer nearly as bad as expected, despite a nearly 50% in single core compounded with a 50% in sheer cores (uses 4+4 design), it still manages retain nearly 75% of the performance! The SD810 was notoriously power hungry and a hot beast to tame - perhaps this benchmark pushed big cores to throttle, making really only helpful in burst scenarios (e.g. loading webpage).
And just for giggles, let’s see how the device with the need for speed, the OnePlus 6, fares:

No surprises that it wins, but whoa, did not see that margin coming!

Hope this was as insightful for you, or at the very least entertaining, as it was for me. Farewell, and goodnight!

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