Mediatek Helio P70 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 450

Mediatek Helio P70

The Mediatek Helio P70 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 4x big ARM Cortex-A73 cores and 4x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A53 cores in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The cores can reach a frequency of up to 2.1 GHz. The processor also integrates a ARM Mali-G72MP3 GPU and a dedicated AI processing unit. Compared to the older Helio P60, the P70 uses the same silicon (most likely) but 100 MHz higher clocked CPU and GPU cores.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 MSM8952 is a mid-range ARMv8-based SoC largely for Android tablets and smartphones announced in September 2015. In addition to 8 Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.5 / 1.2 (performance and power saving cluster) GHz, the SoC integrates an Adreno 405 GPU with a LPDDR3-1866 memory controller and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac), Bluetooth 4.0, UMTS, and LTE. Compared to the older Snapdragon 615, the clock speeds are a bit lower (hits 1.7 GHz max).

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 eight cores of the Snapdragon 617 are divided into two quad-core clusters, each optimized for a different operating point. While one cluster can clock up to 1.5 GHz to handle more demanding applications, the other cluster is limited to a maximum of 1.2 GHz for energy-saving purposes. All eight cores can be active at the same time, although most applications aren't parallelized to support 8 cores efficiently.

Overall, the Snapdragon 617 offers a performance similar to that of the older Snapdragon 600 (Krait architecture).

GPU

Another new feature is the integrated graphics unit named Adreno 405 (most likely around 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 617 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 2048 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 617 is manufactured by TSMC in a 28 nm LP process. According to the specifications, we expect a medium or medium-high power consumption for use in medium-sized or larger smartphones and tablets.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 450

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 450 (SD450) is a lower mainstream SoC for (Android based) smartphones and tablets. It features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.8 GHz and is already manufactured in the power efficient 14nm process. The integrated X9 LTE modem supports Cat. 7 with maximum transfer rates of 300 Mbps (downstream) and 150 Mbps (upstream). The SoC also includes an Adreno 506 GPU with support for Vulkan and OpenGL ES 3.1. WiFi 802.11ac (1x1, max 364 Mbps) and Bluetooth 4.1 are supported as well. The memory controller supports LPDDR3 (single channel) and the integrated video engine supports H.264 (encode and decode) and HEVC (only decode) in 1080p.