Mediatek Helio P90 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 678

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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 678

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 678 (SD678) is a 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 2.2 GHz and  based on the ARM Cortex-A76 design. And a power saving efficiency cluster with up to 1.7 GHz and based on much smaller ARM Cortex-A55 cores. Both clusters can also used together. Compared to the old Snapdragon 675, the clock speed of the cores was increased by 200 MHz for the A76 and 100 MHz for the A55 cores.

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

Compared to the old Snapdragon 675, the 678 is only slightly faster in our benchmarks. Thanks to the two fast Cortex-A76 based cores, the SD678 is able to even best the old high end Snapdragon 835 SoC in some benchmarks.

The Snapdragon 678 is produced in the same 11nm LPP (Low Power Plus) process at Samsung as the 675 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.