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Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 vs Mediatek MT8176

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974

► remove from comparison Qualcomm 800 MSM8974

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 is an ARM-based SoC for tablets and smartphonesIt is built at TSMC in a 28nm HPM (High Performance Mobile) HKMG process, whereas the Snapdragon 600 was manufactured in 28nm LP. In addition to 4 CPU cores with a clock speed of up to 2.3 GHz, the chip also integrates an Adreno 330 GPU up to 450 MHz, an LPDDR3-1600 memory controller and various radio modules (UMTS/LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS).

Processor 

The CPU portion is based on Qualcomm's Krait architecture, which is compatible with ARMv7 ISA. Compared to the Snapdragon 600 (Krait 300), the new Krait 400 cores of the Snapdragon 800 have been tweaked just slightly with faster L2 cache. Thanks to a clock rate of up to 2.3 GHz and a high performance per MHz somewhere between an ARM Cortex-A9 and a Cortex-A15, the Snapdragon 800 offers very strong CPU performance. The S800 competes with the Nvidia Tegra 4, Samsung Exynos 5420 and Apple A7 and is therefore one of the fastest ARM SoCs on the market as of 2013.

Graphics

Another difference between the Snapdragon 600 and 800 is the graphics unit. While the S600 implements an Adreno 320 (400 to 450 MHz), the S800 features the faster Adreno 330 (450 MHz). Both GPUs offer the same amount of texture units (8 TMUs), but the Adreno 330 has 50 percent more shaders (probably 6x SIMD16 vs. 4x SIMD16 of the previous generation). In conjunction with the higher memory bandwidth, the performance is significantly better. As a result, the Adreno 330 is slightly faster than the Mali-T628 (Exynos 5420) and the PowerVR G6430 (Apple A7). Depending on the device and cooling, however, the performance may vary. The GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.0 as well as OpenCL 1.2.

Features 

Furthermore, the MSM8974 supports many wireless technologies: Bluetooth 4.0, WLAN, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5 GHz), GSM (GPRS, EDGE), W-CDMA/UMTS (HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, cat.29 DC-HSPA+), MBMS, cat.4 LTE, CDMA2000 (1X RTT, 1 × EV-DO Rel.0/Rev.A/Rev.B, 1× EV-DO Rev.A MC, 1× Adv Rev.A/Rev.B) and TD-SCDMA. 

The MSM8974 can encode and play UHD 4K videos in 3840x2160 at 30 FPS (120 Mbps H.264 High Profile) sumiltaneously via dedicated hardware. Moreover, it supports both USB 2.0 and 3.0 and cameras up to 55 megapixels and stereoscopic 3D.

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 28nm HPM HKMG process, the energy efficiency has been improved significantly compared to its LP 28nm S600 predecessor. Depending on the field of application, the maximum power consumption should be about 3 W for smartphones or 4 W or greater for tablets. This should be similar to comparable ARM SoCs currently in the market.

Mediatek MT8176

► remove from comparison  MT8176

The 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.

ModelQualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974Mediatek MT8176
SeriesQualcomm Snapdragon Mediatek
CodenameKrait 400Cortex-A72/-A53
Series: Mediatek Cortex-A72/-A53
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC compare2.45 GHz4 / 4 cores Krait 400
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 APQ8074AB compare2.36 GHz4 / 4 cores Krait 400
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AB compare2.36 GHz4 / 4 cores Krait 400
Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AA compare2.26 GHz4 / 4 cores Krait 400
Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 « 2.3 GHz4 / 4 cores Krait 400
Mediatek MT8176 « 2.1 GHz6 / 6 cores Cortex-A72/-A53
Mediatek MT8173 compare2.4 GHz4 / 4 cores Cortex-A72/-A53
Mediatek MT8173C compare2.1 GHz4 / 4 cores Cortex-A72/-A53
Clock2300 MHz2100 MHz
L1 Cache0 MB
L2 Cache2 MB
Cores / Threads4 / 46 / 6
Technology28 nm28 nm
FeaturesAdreno 330 (450 MHz), LTE cat.4, UMTS, MBMS, GSM, CDMA2000, tD-SCDMA, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5 GHz), Bluetooth 4.0, 2x 32 Bit LPDDR3-1600 Memory Controller (12.8 GB/s)20 MP Camera ISP, 4K Video Encoder, H.265, PowerVR GX6250 GPU
iGPUQualcomm Adreno 330 (450 MHz)PowerVR GX6250 (600 MHz)
ArchitectureARMARM
Announced
Manufacturerwww.mediatek.com

Benchmarks

3DMark - 3DMark Ice Storm Physics
min: 5061     avg: 12899     median: 14737 (12%)     max: 17059 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme Physics
min: 5104     avg: 7863     median: 7865 (6%)     max: 10619 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited Physics
min: 6632     avg: 14272     median: 14506 (12%)     max: 17257 Points
min: 9729     avg: 14723     median: 16449 (14%)     max: 17990 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme (ES 3.1) Unlimited Physics
100%
1 MT8176 +
min: 650     avg: 1265     median: 1265 (15%)     max: 1880 Points
3DMark - 3DMark Sling Shot (ES 3.0) Unlimited Physics
817 Points (9%)
744 Points (9%)
Geekbench 4.4 - Geekbench 4.1 - 4.4 64 Bit Single-Core
991 Points (10%)
min: 1541     avg: 1583     median: 1582.5 (16%)     max: 1624 Points
Geekbench 4.4 - Geekbench 4.1 - 4.4 64 Bit Multi-Core
2330 Points (3%)
min: 2489     avg: 3233     median: 3232.5 (4%)     max: 3976 Points
Geekbench 4.0 - Geekbench 4.0 64 Bit Single-Core
100%
1 MT8176 +
1592 Points (22%)
Geekbench 4.0 - Geekbench 4.0 64 Bit Multi-Core
100%
1 MT8176 +
3324 Points (8%)
Geekbench 3 - Geekbench 3 64 Bit Multi-Core
2809 Points (4%)
Geekbench 3 - Geekbench 3 64 Bit Single-Core
926 Points (14%)
min: 3001     avg: 3599     median: 3756 (4%)     max: 4041 ms
Sunspider - Sunspider 1.0 Total Score *
min: 534     avg: 813     median: 739 (8%)     max: 1761 ms
Sunspider - Sunspider 0.9.1 Total Score *
min: 558     avg: 763     median: 758 (7%)     max: 1087 ms
Octane V2 - Octane V2 Total Score
min: 2714     avg: 3981     median: 4089.5 (4%)     max: 5416 Points
min: 3596     avg: 7623     median: 8897 (8%)     max: 10377 Points
Vellamo 3.x - Vellamo 3.x Metal
min: 1178     avg: 1349     median: 1345 (36%)     max: 1526 Points
Vellamo 3.x - Vellamo 3.x Multicore Beta
min: 1541     avg: 1696     median: 1692.5 (38%)     max: 1856 Points
Vellamo 3.x - Vellamo 3.x Browser
min: 2443     avg: 2662     median: 2660 (35%)     max: 2884 Points
Quadrant Standard Edition 2.0 - Quadrant Standard 2.0 Total Score
min: 11103     avg: 18016     median: 19594 (45%)     max: 21610 points
AnTuTu v3 - AnTuTu v3 CPU
15386 Points (100%)
AnTuTu v5 - AnTuTu v5 Total Score
min: 32731     avg: 37780     median: 38083 (38%)     max: 43075 Points
AnTuTu v6 - AnTuTu v6 Total Score
34400 Points (12%)
min: 74177     avg: 76579     median: 76578.5 (26%)     max: 78980 Points
AnTuTu v7 - AnTuTu v7 MEM
100%
1 MT8176 +
6354 Points (19%)
AnTuTu v7 - AnTuTu v7 UX
100%
1 MT8176 +
32176 Points (39%)
AnTuTu v7 - AnTuTu v7 GPU
100%
1 MT8176 +
19714 Points (6%)
AnTuTu v7 - AnTuTu v7 CPU
100%
1 MT8176 +
49540 Points (30%)
AnTuTu v7 - AnTuTu v7 Total Score
100%
1 MT8176 +
107784 Points (19%)
AndEBench - AndEBench Native
min: 11344     avg: 15203     median: 15791.5 (52%)     max: 17777 Iter./s
PCMark for Android - PCM f. Android Computer Vision
2403 Points (13%)
2826 Points (15%)
PCMark for Android - PCM f. Android Storage
2186 Points (5%)
3235 Points (7%)
PCMark for Android - PCM f. Android Work Score 2.0
3699 Points (24%)
min: 4827     avg: 4924     median: 4923.5 (32%)     max: 5020 Points
PCMark for Android - PCM f. Android Work Score
min: 3525     avg: 3905     median: 3950 (20%)     max: 4241 Points
min: 3898     avg: 6032     median: 5843 (29%)     max: 8356 Points

Average Benchmarks Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 MSM8974 → 100% n=11

Average Benchmarks Mediatek MT8176 → 145% n=11

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
* Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation

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Redaktion, 2017-09- 8 (Update: 2023-07- 1)