Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 vs Mediatek MT6735M

Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 is a high-end ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in December 2015, the S820 is the successor to the Snapdragon 810 and should start shipping in the first half of 2016. In addition to 4 CPU cores (two slower clocked and two faster clocked Kryo cores), the SoC integrates an Adreno 530 GPU with a LPDDR4 memory controller  and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ad + MIMO), Bluetooth 4.1, and LTE.

CPU

The Snapdragon 820 is based on a similar concept as ARM's big.LITTLE, which combines a low power CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 1.6 GHz) and a performance CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 2.15 GHz). The clock speed of each cluster can be individually adjusted (but not per core) and the lowest clock speed is 310 MHz. The performance cluster features 1.5 MB L2 cache and the power saving one 512 KB. Both should be using the same architecture and fully support the ARMv8-ISA instruction set.

Although only four cores are used, the performance of the 820 is located in the high end of mobile CPUs for smartphones and tablets.

GPU

The Adreno 530 outperforms the previous Adreno 430 especially in high demanding benchmarks. Therefore it is well suited of modern 3D games on Android devices and should rank slightly below the Tegra X1 GPU.

Features

The Snapdragon 820 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.1, WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad (60 GHz) + MIMO as well as a dual-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 12/13 .

The SoC can encode and decode 4K videos using dedicated hardware (H.264 and H.265).

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 14 nm process, the energy efficiency has been improved noticeably compared to its 20 nm predecessors.

Mediatek MT6735M

The 1.5 GHz MediaTek MT6735M is a 64-bit ARM-based SoC launched in mid 2015 primarily for small budget to mainstream Android devices. The quad-core processor is manufactured in 28 nm and is based on the Cortex-A53 architecture. It integrates a cat.4 LTE modem with CDMA2000 and an ARM Mali-720 GPU capable of decoding and encoding videos of up to 1080p30. Compared to the MT6732, the MT6735M utilizes a slower graphics unit. Compared to the similar MediaTek MT6735, the "M"-version is significantly lower clocked (only 1 versus 1.5 GHz).

Processor

The Cortex-A53 is the successor to the popular Cortex-A7 design. In addition to the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit architecture (ARMv8 ISA) to address more than 4 GB of memory, the new design offers better branch prediction and higher performance-to-power ratio that rivals the Cortex-A9. The four cores of the MT6732 are clocked at up to 1 GHz and therefore the MT6735M is significantly slower than other A53 SoCs that are usually clocked at 1.4 GHz and up.

The power-efficient processor is still suited for low demanding tasks like browsing and running light applications.

Graphics

The integrated single-core Mali-T720 is an entry-level GPU clocked at up to 450 MHz. Most Android games will play at acceptable frame rates on medium resolutions and quality.

Features

The MT6732M SoC integrates a memory controller (32-bit LPDDR3, 6.4 GB/s), multiple radios (WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS), and a cellular modem (GSM, UMTS, GPRS, HSPA+, HSUPA, TD-SCDMA, EVDO, and LTE Cat 4). Its integrated video engine allows for 1080p playback at 30 FPS. Cameras are supported up to 13 MP.