Mediatek Helio G37 vs Mediatek Helio G85 vs Mediatek Helio P90

Mediatek Helio G37

The Mediatek Helio G37 is an entry level ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in late 2020. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 8 ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz. They are divided in two clusters, with the four efficiency cores only clock up to 1.8 GHz. Compared to the similar Helio G35, the G37 offers support for 90 Hz displays and 8 GB RAM.

The performance of the G37 is positioned in the entry level and especially the single core performance is very slow due to the small A53 cores and no big performance cores.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a LTE Cat.4 modem, a Wi-Fi 5 / Bluetooth 5.0 modem, a LPDDR3-933 / LPDDR4-1200 / LPDDR4x-1600 memory controller, a IMG PowerVR GE8320 graphics card, and a 1080p30 video de- and encoder (H.265 decoding, H.264 encoding).

The G37 is produced in 12nm FinFET.

Mediatek Helio G85

The Mediatek Helio G85 is a mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2020. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and integrates 8 CPU cores. Two fast ARM Cortex-A75 cores with up to 2 GHz for performance tasks and six small ARM Cortex-A55 with up to 1.8 GHz for efficiency. All eight cores can be used together thanks to Heterogeneous Multi-Processing support. The integrated GPU is a ARM Mali-G52 MC2 (MP2) with two clusters at up to 1000 MHz (up from 950 MHz from the otherwise similar Helio G80). The SoC also integrates the HyperEngine that handles a dynamic management of CPU, GPU and memory.

The SoC integrates furthermore a LTE radio with Cat-7 (download) / Cat-13 (upload) support, Wifi 5 (ac), Bluetooth 5.0, LPDDR4x 1800 MHz and eMMC 5.1 storage.

Mediatek Helio P90

The Mediatek Helio P90 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2019. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET (12FFC) process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A75 cores (2.2 GHz max.) and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (2 GHz max.) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The processor also integrates a Cat-12 (600 Mbps DL) / Cat-13 (150 Mbps UL) LTE Modem (4G), a PowerVR GM 9446 GPU, and ISP for 64 MP photos and 4K videorecording, and a AI Processing Unit with a theoretical performance of 1165 Giga-Multiply-Adds per second. The memory controller on the die supports dual-channel LPDDR4x-1866 (8 GB max.) and flash memory can be connected by UFS 2.1.

The CPU performance should be slightly below a Snapdragon 730 (e.g. in the Reno2 Z in our benchmarks) and therefore in the upper middle-class of 2019 smartphones.