I really think that the 820 is a good chip. Instead of continuing down the octacore multicore benchmark scenario, they went with a dual core "fast" and dual core "battery efficient" design. I think it's better to applaud them for abandoning an 8 core mobile chip for apps that in general run one at a time and have poor multi-threading design. To me this always seemed like a ploy to make multithreaded benchmarks look better, and improve some edge case scenarios like javascript engine performance in some browsers. So yeah, I think Quallcomm did good with the 820 and 821 design.
However, Samsung is known to have mods to Android to mess with memory management and their core OS has a tendency to be bloated. I'm interested in seeing what a more vanilla phone fares in this test. The one I have my eye on for this particular benchmark is the Asus
Zenfone 3 with the 821 chip and 6 GB of memory. It also has larger and faster storage, which could help significantly with the load times of the games. And it has a more reasonable screen resolution of FHD instead of QHD, which could help responsiveness. Even with all this, I imagine this phone has to cost less than the Note 7.
The other big problem for the Note 7 is the
ZTE Axon 7, which has the same SOC but costs less than half as much. It also has far better audio with a high quality DAC and amp. That being said, the Note 7 trumps the Axon 7 with a better camera and display. But still, $400 vs. $850. You could buy a really nice point and shoot camera that blows away any cell camera for that price difference.
In any case, enough with the hate for the 820! In pure integer / float tests, it's about 10% off the A9 in single core tests. And, what is not mentioned in this article, is that the 820 is also about 7 months old as well. If I had to criticize Quallcomm, I'd have to say that the real problem was the 810 overheating fiasco. They had to have the 810 v1, v2, and v2.1 to try to damage control that whole mess. If the Nexus 6P had the 820 instead of the 810 v2.1 I think it would have been neck and neck with the 6s on real world performance, which is what this guy is trying to simulate in a repeatable fashion.