Also look at the speedometer benchmark (http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/) for a more realistic comparison of how slow your mobile device is compared to your desktop when running real world apps. Here are some numbers from the benchmark from some devices - http://benediktmeurer.de/2016/12/16/the-truth-about-traditio...
Do you really think we're expending 20-30 times the power for a 12 % compute speed-up?
Just to clarify, the two numbers you quote are different benchmarks. You can't compare them, lest say "oh, they're only different by 10 percent".
> the two numbers you quote are different benchmarks
But I don't agree with explanation. Both benchmarks are "PassMarks" (a proprietary measure devised by that company). I don't see them saying that their PassMarks for desktops are different than their PassMarks for smartphones.
Power optimization come at a performance cost.
If a beefy desktop is 100 I'd guess the real world (todomvc) benchmarks are 100/90/20 for desktop/android/iOS, for a recent android and an iPhone 7.
So CPU power (sadly) doesn't translate directly to browser performance as well on android as it does on iOS.
That's the most surprising thing I learned from the article. But I'm still a little skeptical about this. One well-known CPU comparison site[0] gives the following scores:
- The fastest desktop system they rated[1], which happens to have an i7 CPU just as the author is using, is rated 9206.
- Google Pixel XL smartphone[2] gets a score of 8153.
In other words, the Pixel comes out as having 89% of the performance of the fastest desktop system.
I looked at some other metrics for comparing systems, and I'm not seeing how smartphones are only 10% as fast as desktops -- neither in average cases nor in extreme cases (fastest desktop vs fastest smartphone).
[0] PassMark Software Pty Ltd. Their PassMark rating is a composite of tests for CPU, disk, 2D & 3D graphics, and memory.
[1] http://www.passmark.com/baselines/top.html
[2] http://www.androidbenchmark.net/phone.php?phone=Google+Pixel...