Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC vs Amlogic AML8726-MX vs UNISOC Tiger T310

Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AC is an ARM-based SoC for tablets and smartphones. It is built at TSMC in a 28nm HPM (High Performance Mobile) HKMG process and includes 4 Krait 400 cores at up to 2.45 GHz and a Adreno 330 at up to 578 MHz. Compared to the Snapdragon 800 chips like the MS8974AB, the 801 offers a higher clock rate for GPU and CPU and support for eMMC 5.0.

Processor 

The CPU portion is based on Qualcomm's Krait architecture, which is compatible with the ARMv7 ISA. Compared to the Snapdragon 600 (Krait 300), the new Krait 400 cores of the Snapdragon 801 have been tweaked just slightly with faster L2 cache. Thanks to a clock rate of up to 2.45 GHz and a high performance per MHz somewhere between an ARM Cortex-A9 and a Cortex-A15, the Snapdragon 801 offers very strong CPU performance. The S801 competes with the Nvidia Tegra 4, Samsung Exynos 5420 and Apple A7 and is therefore one of the fastest ARM SoCs on the market in the beginning of 2014 (till the Snapdragon 805 arrives).

Graphics

Another difference between the Snapdragon 600 and 800/801 is the graphics unit. While the S600 implements an Adreno 320 (400 to 450 MHz), the S800 and S801 features the faster Adreno 330 (MSM8974AC: 578 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 comparable to 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 MSM8974AC 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. Futhermore the Snapdragon S801 supports Dual SIM Dual Active (DSDA) as the Snapdragon S800 MSM8974AB.

The MSM8974AC can encode and play UHD 4K videos in 3840x2160 at 30 FPS (120 Mbps H.264 High Profile) simultaneously 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. However, the MSM8974AC will likely need a little more power than the slightly lower clocked MSM8974.

Amlogic AML8726-MX

The Amlogic AML8726-M is a cheap SoC (System on a Chip) for Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates two ARM Cortex-A9 cores (max. 1,5 GHz) with SIMD extensions and an ARM Mali-400 graphics card. Furthermore, the chip supports hardware decoding of 1080p videos according to Amlogic.

UNISOC Tiger T310

The Unisoc Tiger T310 is a SoC for smartphones and tablets of the entry level. It was first announced in mid 2019 and integrates four CPU cores (quad core). One big Cortex-A75 core clocked at up to 2 GHz and three small A55 cores with up to 1.8 GHz.

Furthermore, the chip integrates an LTE modem (Cat 7, TDD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TDSCDMA, WCDMA, CDMA, GSM), Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi b/g/n/ac. The integrated ISP supports up to two cameras (16 MPixel and 8 Mpixel, maximum 30 fps video capture) and the GNSS can use all current standards (GPS, Glonass, Beidou, Galileo).

The memory controller is able to drive LPDDR3 at 933 MHz and faster LPDDR4x at 1333 MHz.

The PowerVR GE8300 iGPU is from Imagination and clocked at up to 800 MHz.

The chip is produced in 12nm at TSMC and should offer a rather good power efficiency (for 2019).