Apple A6 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960

The Qualcomm MSM8960 (Snapdragon S4 series) is a ARM based high-end smartphone SoC in 2012. It contains two Krait (ARMv7) CPU cores at 1.5 - 1.7 GHz, a Adreno 225 GPU (400 MHz), a LPDDR2 memory controller (up to 500 MHz) and radio elements including LTE. The chip is produced in 28nm LP (low power process) at TSMC.

The Krait cores offer a slightly better performance as the standard Cortex-A9 cores and are compatible to the NEON SIMD extensions.

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230

The Qualcomm MSM8230 (Snapdragon S4 Plus series) is a ARM based high-end smartphone SoC in 2012. It contains two Krait (ARMv7) CPU cores at up to 1.2 GHz, a Adreno 305 GPU, a single channel LPDDR2 memory controller and radio elements.  The chip is produced in 28nm LP (low power process) at TSMC. Compared to the MSM8930, the 8230 lacks LTE.

The Krait cores offer a slightly better performance as the standard Cortex-A9 cores and are compatible to the NEON SIMD extensions.