Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 vs Mediatek MT8176 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952
Qualcomm Snapdragon 625
► remove from comparisonThe Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 (SD625) is a mid-range octa-core SoC with eight ARM Cortex-A53 cpu cores at up to 2 GHz, an Adreno 506 GPU, a DDR3L-1866 memory controller and a X9 LTE (Cat 7, 4G+, 300 Mbps down, 150 Mbps up) modem. Furthermore, the chip supports 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1. It is manufactured in 14nm FinFet. The processor performance should be similar to a HiSilicon Kirin 650, which also offers 8 Cortex A53 cores at up to 2 GHz. However, due to the modern manufacturing process, power consumption and throttling should be better with the Snapdragon 625.
Mediatek MT8176
► remove from comparisonThe Mediatek MT8176 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC (System on a chip) that was introduced in October 2016 and is primarily used for Android based tablets. It has two fast Cortex-A72 CPU cores running at up to 2.1 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores for power-saving in a big.LITTLE configuration. The graphics unit is based on the IMG Series 6XT (Rogue) and has the designation PowerVR GX6250 clocked at 600 MHz. Among others, the GPU includes a video decoder with 4K and H.265 support (not verified, but was already the case for the older MT8173).
Processor
The biggest highlight of the SoC are the new Cortex-A72 cores, which can be seen as the successors to the Cortex-A57 design. ARM promises much more performance in combination with reduced power consumption, which results in an excellent per-thread performance with the very high maximum clock of 2.4 GHz. The architecture is based on ARMv8-ISA and therefore supports 64-bit.
The four slower, but therefore very frugal Cortex-A53 cores (clocks unknown, probably around 1.4 GHz) are supposed to reduce the power consumption and are always active with light workloads. The big.LITTLE configuration also allows the simultaneous use of all six cores (or any combination of cores from both clusters), so the MT8173 can be called a real hexa-core.
Graphics
The graphics unit is based on Series 6XT (Rogue) from IMG and has the designation PowerVR GX6250. The 2-cluster chip has a unified-shader architecture with a total of 64 FP32 ALUs as well as 4 TMUs. Compared to the MT8173, the clocks were reduced from 700 to 600 MHz, so the gaming performance is a bit lower. High-resolution screens and complex Android games should be powered without bigger problems.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952
► remove from comparisonThe Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952 is a mid-range ARMv8-based SoC largely for Android tablets and smartphones announced in September 2015. In addition to 8 Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.5 / 1.2 (performance and power saving cluster) GHz, the SoC integrates an Adreno 405 GPU with a LPDDR3-1866 memory controller and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac), Bluetooth 4.0, UMTS, and LTE. Compared to the older Snapdragon 615, the clock speeds are a bit lower (hits 1.7 GHz max).
CPU
The Cortex-A53 is the successor to the very popular Cortex-A7 design. In addition to the new 64-bit capable ARMv8 ISA, the cores offer a variety of other improvements such as better branch prediction. This leads to a significantly higher performance per clock, which is even above the older Cortex-A9.
The eight cores of the Snapdragon 617 are divided into two quad-core clusters, each optimized for a different operating point. While one cluster can clock up to 1.5 GHz to handle more demanding applications, the other cluster is limited to a maximum of 1.2 GHz for energy-saving purposes. All eight cores can be active at the same time, although most applications aren't parallelized to support 8 cores efficiently.
Overall, the Snapdragon 617 offers a performance similar to that of the older Snapdragon 600 (Krait architecture).
GPU
Another new feature is the integrated graphics unit named Adreno 405 (most likely around 550 MHz). The Adreno 400 series has been substantially redesigned and supports DirectX 11.2 (FL 11_1) including hardware tessellation, OpenGL ES 3.1, and OpenCL 1.2. Furthermore, the performance has been significantly improved, which is now similar to the Adreno 320 and PowerVR G6200.
Features
The Snapdragon 617 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 and WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac as well as a Multi-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 4 (up to 150 Mbps), WCDMA, CDMA, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE.
The SoC can encode and decode 1080p videos using dedicated hardware and stream content to displays with up to 2560 x 2048 pixels. A large number of video codecs including H.265 (playback only) will be supported. The camera ISP can handle sensors with up to 21 MP.
Power Consumption
The Snapdragon 617 is manufactured by TSMC in a 28 nm LP process. According to the specifications, we expect a medium or medium-high power consumption for use in medium-sized or larger smartphones and tablets.
Model | Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 | Mediatek MT8176 | Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Series | Qualcomm Snapdragon | Mediatek | Qualcomm Snapdragon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Codename | Cortex-A53 | Cortex-A72/-A53 | Cortex-A53 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Series: Snapdragon Cortex-A53 |
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Clock | 2000 MHz | 2100 MHz | 1500 MHz | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Cores / Threads | 8 / 8 | 6 / 6 | 8 / 8 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Technology | 14 nm | 28 nm | 28 nm | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Features | Adreno 506 GPU, 802.11ac WLAN, Bluetooth 4.1, LTE Cat. 7, Dual-Channel LPDDR3-1866 Memory Controller | 20 MP Camera ISP, 4K Video Encoder, H.265, PowerVR GX6250 GPU | Adreno 405 GPU, Dual-Stream 802.11ac WLAN, Bluetooth, LTE Cat. 7, GPS (iZat Gen8C), 32/64 Bit LPDDR3-1866 Memory Controller | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
iGPU | Qualcomm Adreno 506 | PowerVR GX6250 (600 MHz) | Qualcomm Adreno 405 ( - 550 MHz) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Architecture | ARM | ARM | ARM | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Announced | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Manufacturer | www.qualcomm.com | www.mediatek.com | www.qualcomm.com |