Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (8998) vs Mediatek MT8176

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 (8998)

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Mobile Platform (MSM8998) is a high-end SoC for smartphones (mostly Android based) that was released early 2017. Its one of the first processors that is manufactured in 10 nm (LPE FinFET at Samsung). The SD835 is the successor to the Snapdragon 821.

It integrates 4x Kryo 280 at 2.45 GHz (max) for performance and 4x Kryo 280 at 1.9 GHz (max) for efficiency. Furthermore offers an X16 LTE modem, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ad WiFi, a dual-channel 32-Bit 1866 MHz LPDDR4x memory controller, an UFS 2.1 controller, Hexagon 682 DSP, Spectra 180 Image Seonsor Prozessor, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, GLONASS, Baeidou, Galileo Satellite Support.

Mediatek 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.