The SD845 being not quite stable (with this particular S9 phone at least) with sustained gpu loads is quite a surprise (since the power usage looks quite reasonable).
Albeit I'm wondering if it could have local temperature hotspots - the mali g72-mp18 may have terrible area efficiency, but of course on the upside this at least means power density is only half as large... (And if the Adreno 630 is actually smaller than the Adreno 540 power density would be larger too - not sure about how it compares in size due to it seemingly being only a 2-core design vs. the previous 4-core one, for that matter are you sure it really doubled alu units and not just alu units per core, since the results do not indicate anywhere close to double the performance in the alu tests I've seen.)
FWIW I think the SPEC comparisons are very interesting.
Although I'd have liked to see voltage / frequency curves for the SD 845 too, I'm kinda wondering if it also sacrifices energy efficiency completely at the highest frequencies.
Surely for the M3 cores the frequencies above ~2.3Ghz are inefficient enough that they should not have been used in the first place (well, in a smartphone). But of course if it would only reach 2.3Ghz then the core would not really be all that much faster than the A75 at its max frequency, making all the spending of transistors and area quite pointless.
If DVFS needs half a second to reach the max frequency that indeed could explain a lot of the trouble with the SoC.
Kind of interesting that everybody was like "the US gets a gimped version of the S9" whereas it looks like in fact you get a much better deal there
. Unless Samsung can improve the DVFS issues - I tend to believe though battery life would still be significantly worse.
