There has been a lot of news related to benchmarking lately, including an admission by Google that they blocked Play Store downloads of benchmarking apps during the Pixel 8 review embargo, as well as fresh chips coming down the pipeline by Qualcomm and MediaTek.
Discussion questions:
Do smartphone benchmarks matter?
Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?
Storage space, support cycle, type of screen, third party OS support, aftermarket accessories, camera quality. Size.
Also kinda part of the SoC, but the frequencies supported since I travel a lot.
I think phones have been fast enough for a while now. There's more to a SoC than speed. When I came back to Android, I went from the fastest iPhone to a SD480 with only 6GB of RAM and it was...fine for daily use. But the camera was a big letdown on that device so I got something a little bit better a year later.