Apple A11 Bionic vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AA

Apple A11 Bionic

The Apple A11 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X. It was announced late 2017 and offers 6 cores divided in 2 performance cores and four power efficiency cores. In comparison to the A10X all 6 cores can be used at once, leading to a much higher theoretical performance. In our benchmarks the SoC however is not only faster in multi threaded tests (+77% versus A10 Fusion in Geekbench), but also in single threaded tests (+19%). Apple states 25% more performance compared to the A10 in the iPhone 7.

With 4.3 Billion transistors, the A11 Bionic is a rather big chip especially compared to the Snapdragon 835 (3 Billion) or a Skylake desktop quad-core Soc (1.75 Billion).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AA

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AA is an ARM-based SoC for tablets and smartphones. It 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 2.26 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). Compared to other S801 SoCs (e.g the MSM8974AB), the MSM8974AA offers the lowest CPU-, GPU- and memory clock rates.

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 800/801 have been tweaked just slightly with faster L2 cache. Thanks to a clock rate of up to 2.26 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 as of 2013.

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 /S801 feature the faster Adreno 330 (MSM8974Aa: 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 MSM8974AA 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 MSM8974AA 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 MSM8974AA will likely to need a little less power than the other S801 SoCs due to the lower clock rates.