Intel Atom D525 vs Apple A6 vs Rockchip RK3288

Intel Atom D525

The Intel Atom D525 is a dual core processor that is intended for nettops, but also used in netbooks (like the Asus Eee PC 1215N). It consists out of two Atom cores clocked at 1.8 GHz and due to HyperThreading, the D525 is able to process four threads at a time. The D525 misses Speedstep and is therefore running at 1.8 GHz all the time (and using a lot more power than other Atoms without load).

In the processor package, the Atom D525 has an integrated DDR2/DDR3 memory controller and the GMA 3150 called graphics card.

The performance of the D525 can be on a level of slow clocked single core CPUs like the Intel SU2700 or AMD K125 if both cores are used. In single threaded applications, the performance is clearly worse and only on the level of a 1.8 GHz Atom CPU.

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 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.