Samsung Exynos 850 vs UNISOC T820 vs MediaTek Dimensity 720

Samsung Exynos 850

The Samsung Exynos 850 is a System on a Chip (SoC) for entry level smartphones (Android based). It was announced in May 2020 and the first device with it is the Samsung Galaxy A21s. The chip integrates a processor with 8 small ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock with up to 2 GHz (octa core).

The multi threaded performance is quite good thanks to 8 cores, the single threaded performance suffers a bit from the small A55 cores, although the clock rate of up to 2 GHz can help a bit.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a LTE modem (Cat.7 2CA up to 300 MBit/s download, Cat.13 2CA 150 MBit/s upload), a Wi-fi 5 modem (802.11ac), LPPDDR4x memory controller, eMMC 5.1 flash memory controller and a video engine for FHD 60fps encoding and decoding (H.265, H.264, VP9).

It is manufactured in the modern 8nm LPP process at Samsung and should offer a good power efficiency and therefore it is also suited for small smartphones.

UNISOC T820

The Unisoc T820 (former Spreadtrum) is a mid range SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It integrates an octa-core CPU with three clusters. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 clocked at up to 2.7 GHz, three more A76 performance cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz and a power efficiency cluster of four ARM-Cortex-A55 cores with up to 2.1 GHz. The integrated memory controller supports LPDDR4/4X with up to 2133 MHz (2x 16 Bit). The integrated ISP supports two main cameras and two subsidiary cameras (up to 108 MPix). The integrated graphics card is an ARM Mali-G57 MC4 (4 cores) at up to 850 MHz. Unisoc also specifies that the T820 offers hardware AI acceleration with up to 8.0 TOPS peak performance of the NPU.

The chip is manufactured in the modern 6nm EUV process.

MediaTek Dimensity 720

The Mediatek Dimensity 720 is a mid-range SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It includes four fast ARM Cortex-A76 cores and four power efficient Cortex-A55 cores, all clocked at up to 2 GHz (Octa-Core with Heterogeneous Multi-Processing). Furthermore, the chip integrates a 3 core ARM Mali-G57 MC3 GPU, a Wi-fi 5 modem, a LPDDR4x memory controller, a AI processing unit (APU) and video de- and encoding. Compared to the faster Dimensity 820, the CPU cores are lower clocked and the GPU offers less cores. Furthermore, all other features were slightly restricted (e.g. max. 12 GB RAM).

The Dimensity 720 is manufactured in the modern 7nm process and should be very power efficient.