Intel Atom D525 vs Rockchip RK3188 vs HiSilicon Kirin 910

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.

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.

HiSilicon Kirin 910

The HiSilicon Kirin 910 is an ARM based quad core SoC for Android smartphones and tablets. As HiSilicon is fully owned by Huawei, the chip is mostly used in Huawei models like the MediaPad X1, P6 S, MediaPad M1 and Honor 3C 4G). The SoC integrates four Cortex-A9 cores (at 1.6 GHz max.), a ARM Mali-450 MP4 GPU (at 533 MHz), a 32-bit single-channel LPDDR3-1600 memory controller (533 MHz) and a LTE Cat. 4 radio. The similar named HiSilicon Kirin 910T is a 200 MHz higher clocked (CPU) version.

At the time of announcement in mid 2014, the CPU performance is in the mid-range of smartphone and tablet SoCs. The power consumption is a bit higher than usual, as the CPU cores are rather high clocked.