I just got my Fairphone 3+ recently, and noticed that apps feel a bit more sluggish than my old first generation Pixel XL. I ran Geekbench 5, and got a single-core score of 263 and a multi-core score of 1203 on the fairphone, but 323 and 964 respectively on the Pixel.
Is this normal? The Fairphone is running /e/OS Android 10 while the Pixel is running LineageOS Android 8.1, both of which I custom installed. Could it be a software issue or is that just how it is?
Solved! Credit to this Reddit comment
In short: Yes. The FP3+ has a mid-range SoC from a couple years ago (Qualcomm Snapdragon 632), and the Pixel XL has a top-range SoC from a generation earlier (Qualcomm Snapdragon 821).
If you take the very complete benchmarks from e.g. Notebookcheck (see here for a direct comparison), the geekbench results approximately match what you found: The Pixel XL’s processor is faster in single-core, and approximately matched in multi-core benchmarks.
Fairphone picked that processor based on the experiences with the Fairphone 2, which had a then top-of-the-line processor that had support dropped by Qualcomm within 2 years, much earlier than they had designed their phone to last. As a result, they had to devote a lot of manpower to keep supporting this processor themselves, and ended up the only company to make the Snapdragon 801 run Android 9 and 10.
In contrast, the mid-range SoC they chose for the FP3 / 3+will be used for a couple generations in mid-range phones and as a result will have much longer driver support from Qualcomm, more in line with their philosophy of designing their phone for longer life. The tradeoff is that it not very competetive on performance.
I’m a little bummed, but not that much. Still happy with the Fairphone.
I noticed the same thing on mine. Setting the performance profile to ‘performance’ helped a bit.