Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 415 MSM8929

Qualcomm Snapdragon 439

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 (SD439) is a lower mainstream SoC for (Android based) smartphones and tablets. Compared to the older Snapdragon 435, the 439 is now manufactured in the current 12nm FinFET process and offers higher clock speeds of 2 GHz of the eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores (compared to 1.4 GHz). Wifi (now ac Wave 2 / Wifi 5) and Bluetooth (v5) were also updated, however the GPU still is the rather slow Adreno 505 and the LTE modem was even downgraded to a X6 with only Cat. 4/5 (max. 150 Mbps download, 75 Mbps upload).

Thanks to the higher maximum clock speed, the performance of the Snapdragon 439 mobile platform can reach the old Snapdragon 625 (also 2 GHz with 8x Cortex-A53). However, there is still a big gap to the SoCs with bigger performance cores.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 415 MSM8929

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 415 (8929) is an ARM-based mid-range SoC for tablets and smartphones (mostly Android based). It was announced in February 2015 and integrates eight 64-Bit Cortex-A53 CPU cores (octa-core) that clock with up to 1.4 GHz. Furthermore, there is a Adreno 405 graphics card, a LPDDR3 memory controller (max. 667 MHz, 5.3 GB/s) and wireless radios for WiFi and 4G/LTE included in the chip.

The Cortex-A53 is the successor of the entry level Cortex-A7 CPU cores. The A53 is now capable of 64 Bit (ARMv8-ISA) and adressing more than 4 GB RAM. According to ARM the performance per MHz is a lot better and even surpasses a Cortex-A9 core.

The integrated Adreno 405 is clocked with about 500 MHz and supports DirectX 11.1 incl. hardware Tesselation, OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenCL 1.2.

The integrated wireless radios support WiFi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, 2G, 3G and 4G (LTE Cat.4) standards. Futhermore, the SoC is able to decode 1080p videos in H.265 (encode only in H.264) and cameras with up to 13 MP.

The power consumption of the chip is ranging in the mid range, and therefore it is also suited for smaller smartphones.