The low end iPhone SE compares favorably with the highest end Samsung Galaxy.

https://www.androidauthority.com/iphone-se-vs-most-powerful-...

Do many people care about phone CPU performance? Sure, it needs to be good enough, but after that it's really far down on the list of things that matter.

What matters to everyone I know is screen size, camera quality and that a really small selection of apps (messaging, maps, email, browser, bank app) work well. Raw CPU performance is only a very abstract concept.

Raw CPU performance, perhaps not. But people definitely do care about a specific set of user-facing, ML-driven functionality - think speech recognition, speech synthesis, realtime video filtering, and so on.

Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs, and at a significant cost to power consumption. Developing for newer devices is like night and day.

Not sure that's true to be honest. Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2 is miles ahead of anything I've seen on any iPhone, which are 2-4x faster.

Google's speech recognition is damn impressive, but I'm talking performance/power consumption, not "quality". Sticking a 2080 into an iPhone won't give you better speech recognition results, but it will give you bad results faster.

Because speech recognition quality is a product of data harvesting, the one thing Google does well?

> > Many of these are only barely possible on "pre-neural" mobile ARM CPUs

> Speech recognition on my old Pixel 2

I don't think the Pixel 2 can be called "pre-neural". "[...] The PVC is a fully programmable image, vision and AI multi-core domain-specific architecture (DSA) for mobile devices and in future for IoT.[2] It first appeared in the Google Pixel 2 and 2 XL [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Visual_Core

When speech recognition starts understanding European Portuguese without me playing stupid accent exercises, and mixed language sentences as well, then I will care about it.

I suspect access to a vast trove of user data is more important for ML than raw CPU power on the client.

I'm just talking real-time performance and power consumption, not accuracy.

It's nice that the iPhone SE performs so well, but there's more to a phone than just the CPU.

> only one camera, just a 4.7-inch display, and less than Full HD screen resolution

cpu selection is likely coming from industrialization concerns, less production line to maintain, less price per unit at volume etc, but they're going to beat that drum loud and proud for all it's worth, meanwhile the phone is cheap in area that in 2020 _do_ matter.