Mediatek Helio G81 Ultra vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 vs Mediatek Helio G85

Mediatek Helio G81 Ultra

The Mediatek Helio G81 Ultra 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 2 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 950 MHz. The SoC also integrates the HyperEngine that handles a dynamic management of CPU, GPU and memory.

Compared to the old Helio G80, the G81 offers support for 120Hz displays.

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 675

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 (SD675) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It features 8 Kryo 460 called cores (64-Bit capable) that are divided in two clusters. A fast cluster of two cores with up to 2 GHz and  based on the ARM Cortex-A76 design. And a power saving efficiency cluster with up to 1.6 GHz and based on much smaller ARM Cortex-A55 cores. Both clusters can also used together.

In addition to the 8 CPU cores, the SoC integrates a lower mid range Adreno 612 GPU, a X12 LTE Modem with up to 600 Mbps download (Cat 12) and 150 Mbps upload (Cat 13), a 802.11ac (Wifi 5) Wave 2 WLAN modem (up to 867 Mbps), a Bluetooth 5.0 radio, satellite positioning (GPS, QZSS, GLONASS, SBAS, Beidou and Galileo) and a video engine (up to 4k30 encoding and support for H.265, H.264, VP8 and VP9).

Performance

Thanks to the two fast Cortex-A76 based cores, the SD675 is able to even best the old high end Snapdragon 835 SoC in some benchmarks. The less powerful Snapdragon 670 e.g. only achieves 70 to 77% of the performance in Geekbench 4.3 (single - multi core test). Current high-end SoCs like the Snapdragon 855 however can still add 50-70% on top of the performance of the 675.

The Snapdragon 675 is produced in the new 11nm LPP (Low Power Plus) process at Samsung which is a combination of 14nm and 10nm. Compared to 14nm LPP, the 11nm LPP process should be able to increase performance by 15% and decrease the chip size by 10% according to Samsung.

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.