Samsung Exynos 8890 Octa vs Apple A9 vs Apple A9X

Samsung Exynos 8890 Octa

The Samsung Exynos 8890 Octa is a System on a Chip (SoC) for smartphones and tablets. It was announced late 2015 and first appeared in some Galaxy S7 devices in the beginning of 2016. It integrates four Samsung M1 cores where two are clocked at 2.6 GHz and all four cores under load at 2.3 GHz. Furthermore, four power saving ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.6 GHz are present adding to a total of 8 cores. As a graphics card, Samsung integrated a ARM Mali-T880 MP12 (12 cluster version). The memory controller supports 2 x 32 Bit LPDDR4 with up to 1800 MHz.

The processor performance is on par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 that can also be found in some variants of the Galaxy S7. The 820 is faster in single threaded tasks, the 8890 pulls ahead if it can use all 8 cores. Therfore, the 8890 is one of the fastest smartphones SoCs in 2016.

Apple A9

The Apple A9 is a high-end dual-core ARM SoC for smartphones. It was announced in Sept. 2015 in the new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. Technical details were not published, but the CPU part should be about 70% and the GPU 90% faster than the previous Apple A8. Therefore, the performance should be on par with high-end Android SoCs in 2015.

It is based on the third generation of Apples 64 Bit architectures (Cyclone 3?) and uses a "new transistor technology". It is manufactured at Samsung in 14nm (slightly smaller die) and TSMC at 16nm (both FINFET 3D transistors). A performance difference of both versions are not noticable.

Furthermore, the chip now integrates the M9 motion coprocessor and a 4K video de- and encoder (as the iPhones 6s supports 4K video recording). The integrated graphics card should be still based on PowerVR technology.

The power consumption could be lower than the A8 due to the new process technology and the fact that the iPhones now got a smaller battery (due to the haptic engine part).

Apple A9X

The Apple A9X is a high-end ARM SoC (System on a Chip) that was announced in September 2015 in the iPad Pro. Technical details are scarce, what we know is that it is based on the third generation of Apples 64 Bit architecture (Cyclone 3) and manufactured with a "new transistor technology" (14 or 16nm FINFet probably).

The performance of the A9X did improve a lot according to Apple. The CPU part should be 1.8x faster and the GPU part even 2x faster than the already speedy Apple A8X. Apple even stated in the keynote of the iPad Pro that the performance should be "faster than 80% of portable PCs shipped in the last 12 month". Furthermore the iPad Pro now features a 2x higher memory bandwidth (DDR4?) and 2x faster storage performance. The integrated graphics card will most likely be a PowerVR design again (Power VR Series7?).