Samsung Exynos 5420 Octa vs vs MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X

Samsung Exynos 5420 Octa

The Samsung Exynos 5420 Octa (also called Exynos 5 Octa) is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) for smartphones and tablets. It was launched in mid-2013 alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and features four Cortex-A15 cores clocked at up to 1.9 GHz. Furthermore, there are four additional Cortex-A7 cores at up to 1.3 GHz, an ARM Mali-T628 MP6 GPU and a 2x 32 bit LPDDR3(E)-1866 memory controller up to 14.9 GB/s.

Processor 

Compared to the commonly used Cortex-A9 and Cortex-A7 architecture, the A15 cores offer at least 50 percent higher performance per clock, which makes the Exynos 5420 one of the fastest ARM SoCs of 2013. On average, the CPU performance is roughly on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 or Nvidia Tegra 4. 

In addition, Samsung has integrated four Cortex-A7 cores clocked up to 1.3 GHz. Depending on the system load, the SoC will automatically switch between the more powerful A15 cores and the more efficient A7 cores to improve power consumption and battery life in a concept Samsung calls big.LITTLE". In contrast to the previous Exynos 5410, all eight cores can be used simultaneously, so that the chip can be described as the first "true" octa-core SoC in its class.

Graphics

The Exynos 5420 integrates a Mali-T628 MP6 GPU, which offers six shader clusters clocked at up to 600 MHz (115 GFLOPS). The Mali-T628 supports OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.1 and DirectX 11 and offers a performance that is just sligthly behind the Adreno 330 (Snapdragon 800) or a PowerVR G6430 (Apple A7). Thus, the GPU is one of the high-end solutions as of 2013 and can run even the most demanding Android games at high resolutions (up to 2560 x 1600 pixels) and detail settings.

Power Consumption

The Exynos 5 Octa should have an estimated maximum TDP of about 3 to 4 W on a smartphone. It is possible that sustained load will lead to throttling of the CPU or GPU, especially in smartphones.

MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X

The Mediatek Helio X27 MT6797X is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based). It is manufactured in a 20 nm process and is equipped with 10 CPU cores. Two fast Cortex-A72 cores are running at up to 2.6 GHz (performance), four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 2 GHz (balanced) and four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.6 GHz (efficiency). All cores support 64-bit and the utilization of three clusters is supposed to improve efficiency according to Mediatek. The two A72 cores are only designed for short "Burst-Performance scenarios" according to Mediatek and are probably not used for sustained workloads. Compared to the similar named MT6797, the MT6797X was introduced later and offers higher clock speeds for CPU and GPU.

The integrated ARM Mali T880 MP4 (according to Wikipedia) GPU is clocked at up to 875 MHz and has four cluster (from 16) from the Midgard (4th Gen) architecture.

The chip also includes an LTE modem (Cat. 6 300/50 Mbps, DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, EDGE, CDMA2000, ...) as well as a WLAN 802.11ac (280 Mbps) modem. GPS/Glonass/BeiDou is supported for location. The integrated video encoder can handle up to 4Kx2K H.265 at 30 fps and HDR. The SoC can also decode H.265, H.264 and VP9 in 4K30. 

Power Consumption

The processor is manufactured in a 20 nm process at TSMC and should have an average power consumption under load.