Mediatek Helio G85 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 (MSM8917)

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936 is a mid-range ARMv8-based SoC largely for Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in February 2014, the S610 is one of the first 64-bit capable SoCs from Qualcomm. In addition to 4 Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.7 GHz, the SoC integrates an Adreno 405 GPU with a 2x 32-bit memory controller (LPDDR3-1600, 12.8 GB/s) and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac), Bluetooth 4.0, UMTS and LTE.

CPU

The Cortex-A53 is the successor to the very popular Cortex-A7 design. In addition to the new 64-bit capable ARMv8 ISA, the cores offer a variety of other improvements such as better branch prediction. This leads to a significantly higher performance per clock, which is even above the older Cortex-A9.

The four cores of the Snapdragon 610 are clocked at up to 1.7 GHz, offering a performance similar to that of the older Snapdragon 600 (Krait architecture).

GPU

Another new feature is the integrated graphics unit named Adreno 405 (550 MHz). The Adreno 400 series has been substantially redesigned and supports DirectX 11.2 (FL 11_1) including hardware tessellation, OpenGL ES 3.1, and OpenCL 1.2. Furthermore, the performance has been significantly improved, which is now similar to the Adreno 320 and PowerVR G6200.

Features

The Snapdragon 610 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 and WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac as well as a Multi-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 4 (up to 150 Mbps), WCDMA, CDMA, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE.

The SoC can encode and decode 1080p videos using dedicated hardware and stream content to displays with up to 2560 x 1600 pixels. A large number of video codecs including H.265 (playback only) will be supported. The camera ISP can handle sensors with up to 21 MP.

Power Consumption

The Snapdragon 610 is manufactured by TSMC in a 28 nm LP process. According to the specifications, we expect a medium power consumption for use in medium-sized smartphones and tablets.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 (MSM8917)

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 (8917) is an ARM-based entry level SoC for tablets and smartphones (mostly Android based). It was announced in February 2016 and integrates four 64-Bit Cortex-A53 CPU cores (quad-core) that clock with up to 1.4 GHz. Furthermore, there is a Adreno 308 graphics card, a LPDDR3 memory controller (max. 667 MHz) and wireless radios for WiFi and 4G/LTE included in the chip.

The Cortex-A53 is the successor of the entry level Cortex-A7 CPU cores. The A53 is now capable of 64 Bit (ARMv8-ISA) and adressing more than 4 GB RAM. According to ARM the performance per MHz is a lot better and even surpasses a Cortex-A9 core.

The integrated Adreno 308 ist the integrated graphics card that supports OpenGL ES 3.0.

The integrated wireless radios support WiFi 802.11ac Wave 2, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS/GLONASS/Baidou, 2G, 3G and 4G (LTE Cat.4) standards. Futhermore, the SoC is able to decode 1080p videos in H.265 (encode only in H.264) and cameras with up to 13 MP.

The power consumption of the chip is ranging in the lower range, and therefore it is also suited for smaller smartphones. It is manufactured in 28 nm LP at TSMC.