Apple A6 vs Marvell PXA986 vs Rockchip RK3288

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.

Marvell PXA986

The Marvell PXA986 is an ARM based dual-core SoC for smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It contains two Cortex-A9 CPU cores usually clocked around 1.2 GHz and a Vivante GC1000 graphics card. The integrated video processor is able to handle 720p30 content in H.263, H.264 BP and MPEG4 SP encoding. Furthermore, a GSM/EDGE/WCDMA/HSDPA radio is included in the chip.

Rockchip RK3288

The Rockchip RK3288 is a mid-range ARM SoC for Android and Chrome OS mobile systems. It integrates four Cortex-A12 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz. ARM calls these cores Cortex-A17 due to them having very similar performance levels. The SoC includes an ARM Mali-T760 MP4 (also called Mali-T764) GPU clocked at 600 MHz and a dual-channel DDR3, DDR3L, LPDDR2, LPDDR3 memory controller.

The ARM Cortex-A12 is the successor to the Cortex-A9 and is based on a 32 Bit ARMv7-A microarchitecture. A single A12 core should be roughly 40 % more powerful than an A9 core according to ARM.

The integrated video engine supports encoding of H.264, VP8, and MVC videos up to 1080p. Decoding is supported for videos up to 4K H.264 and 10 Bit H.265.

The chip is manufactured under a 28 nm HKMG process.