New chart makes us wonder why we paid to upgrade our phones from 2015-2017

Xiaomi today held a new product event during which it unveiled the 5G version of the Mi Mix 3, and its new Mi 9 flagship. During the event, the company happened to display a chart showing CPU performance on various Snapdragon chipsets over the years starting with the Snapdragon 805, unveiled in November 2013. The goal of the chart was to highlight a 45% increase in the performance of the Kryo 485 CPUs on the new Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform, compared with the Kryo 385 CPUs on last year's Snapdragon 845 SoC. The Snapdragon 855 will power Xiaomi's newly introduced handsets.

Spotted by tipster Roland Quandt, who disseminated a photo of the slide on Twitter, the chart seems to indicate that the Snapdragon 810, 820 and 835 had no difference in CPU performance. You might recall that there was plenty of speculation about the Snapdragon 810 chipset overheating, and Qualcomm reportedly designed a second version of the chip that was used by smartphone manufacturers. Still, some phone makers decided to avoid the controversy by using the less powerful hexa-core Snapdragon 808 chipset on higher end phones. For example, LG used the Snapdragon 808 on its then-flagship LG G4. Qualcomm insisted that LG went for the Snapdragon 808 before the Snapdragon 820 got hot-literally.

The fallout from the overheating Snapdragon 810 saw Samsung use its Exynos chip for the Galaxy S6 line in all regions (usually in China and the U.S., Samsung uses Qualcomm's chipset), and Qualcomm made some changes for the Snapdragon 820 SoC. It debuted its own Kryo CPU, and reduced the number of cores to four from the eight found on the Snapdragon 810.

Perhaps the chart is not drawn to scale, or Xiaomi sourced some incorrect information because each generation of the Snapdragon chip did include a jump in CPU performance.