TWO SIDES OF A COIN
The momentum among technology brands releasing some of their biggest updates in 2022 continues strong towards the last quarter of the year, and the team behind hardwarezone. com and HWM have been kept busy reviewing flagship after flagship. At some point, we have to remind ourselves that many of these products we review are at the very top range of performance, so the true differences are actually quite miniscule in day to day use.
If you're already set on splurging for the top-end model of any brand or product, then it is likely that the difference in some benchmark number is not going to make or break your experience with it.
What was interesting for me, while compiling this issue of HWM, were the differences in approach to quantify performance. I would say that the industry is now in a transitioning phase and we may not necessarily have all the right tools to showcase this new performance shift, but raw numbers and ‘specs' are slowly being put on the backburner.
You can see this behaviour in recent launches for the Google Pixel 7 for example, where software and algorithm improvements were valued higher than how many transistors there are in the Tensor G2 processor. Even microprocessor giant Intel has been shifting away from such such numbers, and as much as the wider community likes to use them as a punching bag for their (in)ability to shrink die size the past few years, their Performance Hybrid architecture, even on an ‘old' 10nm node is still proving to be able to lead the race against AMD's much newer and more advanced 5nm node.
So where does that leave us? Specifications are important, but performance can no longer be guaranteed just because someone has better hardware.
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