Apple A6 vs Rockchip RK3188 vs UNISOC Tiger T310

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.

Rockchip RK3188

The Rockchip RK3188 is a fast ARM SoC primarily designed for tablets. It integrates four ARM Cortex A9 cores with NEON extension and a clock speed of up to 1.8 GHz, a Mali-400 MP4 graphics card (up to 600 MHz, 24 GFLOPS) and a low-power (LP-)DDR2/DDR3 memory controller. Due to the high clock rates, the performance of the CPU and GPU is superior to other Cortex-A9 quad-cores such as the Nvidia Tegra 3 and Samsung Exynos 4412. These high frequencies are possible due to the 28nm process (TSMC). However, this results in high power consumption and is thus not suited for compact smartphones.

UNISOC Tiger T310

The Unisoc Tiger T310 is a SoC for smartphones and tablets of the entry level. It was first announced in mid 2019 and integrates four CPU cores (quad core). One big Cortex-A75 core clocked at up to 2 GHz and three small A55 cores with up to 1.8 GHz.

Furthermore, the chip integrates an LTE modem (Cat 7, TDD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TDSCDMA, WCDMA, CDMA, GSM), Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi b/g/n/ac. The integrated ISP supports up to two cameras (16 MPixel and 8 Mpixel, maximum 30 fps video capture) and the GNSS can use all current standards (GPS, Glonass, Beidou, Galileo).

The memory controller is able to drive LPDDR3 at 933 MHz and faster LPDDR4x at 1333 MHz.

The PowerVR GE8300 iGPU is from Imagination and clocked at up to 800 MHz.

The chip is produced in 12nm at TSMC and should offer a rather good power efficiency (for 2019).