Apple A6 vs HiSilicon Kirin 655 vs Marvell Armada PXA1908

Apple A6

The Apple A6 is a dual-core SoC found in the iPhone 5 with ARM compatible CPU cores. The A6 was developed by Apple and supports the extended ARMv7s instruction set. The clock rate of the CPU is between 800 to 1200 MHz depending on the CPU load. The integrated GPU is a PowerVR SGX543MP3 at 266 MHz.

HiSilicon Kirin 655

The HiSilicon Kirin 655 is an ARM-based octa-core SoC for mid-range smartphones and tablets. It was announced late 2016 and features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores. Four cores can be clocked with up to 1.7 GHz (power saving cores) and four with up to 2.1 GHz (performance cores). The difference to the older Kirin 650 is the 100 MHz higher clock speed of the performance cores.

Furthermore, a ARM Mali-T830 MP2 graphics card (at 600 MHz or 900 MHz with 40.8 GFLOPS), a 64-Bit LPDDR3 memory controller and a dual-sim capable LTE Cat. 6 (max. 300 MBit/s and GSM, WCDMA, UMTS, HSPA+) radio are integrated in the SoC. The processor performance can be compared with the older Kirin 930 and therefore sufficient for daily usage as browsing and non demanding apps. High-end SoCs with Cortex-A57 or A72 cores however should be noticeably faster. The SoC is produced in a modern 16nm FinFET process and is therefore very power efficient.

Marvell Armada PXA1908

The Marvell Armada PXA1908 is an ARM based low end SoC for smartphones and tablets. The chip was announced in late 2014 and integrates four 64-Bit Cortex-A53 processor cores with up to 1.2 GHz. As a graphics card, the SoC integrates a Vivante GC7000UL. Furthermore, a LPDDR2/3 memory controller and a HSPA+/WCDMA/LTE Cat. 4 (max. 150 Mbit/s) radio is integrated. The SoC is manufactured in 28nm and also suited for small smartphones.