HiSilicon Kirin 910 vs Broadcom BCM21664T vs Rockchip RK3188

HiSilicon Kirin 910

The HiSilicon Kirin 910 is an ARM based quad core SoC for Android smartphones and tablets. As HiSilicon is fully owned by Huawei, the chip is mostly used in Huawei models like the MediaPad X1, P6 S, MediaPad M1 and Honor 3C 4G). The SoC integrates four Cortex-A9 cores (at 1.6 GHz max.), a ARM Mali-450 MP4 GPU (at 533 MHz), a 32-bit single-channel LPDDR3-1600 memory controller (533 MHz) and a LTE Cat. 4 radio. The similar named HiSilicon Kirin 910T is a 200 MHz higher clocked (CPU) version.

At the time of announcement in mid 2014, the CPU performance is in the mid-range of smartphone and tablet SoCs. The power consumption is a bit higher than usual, as the CPU cores are rather high clocked.

Broadcom BCM21664T

The Broadcom BCM21664T is an ARM based entry-level SoC for smartphones that integrates two Cortex-A9 CPU cores clocked at up to 1.2 GHz and a HSPA+ modem with support for 21 Mbps HSDPA and 5.8 Mbps HSUPA. Furthermore, a VideoCore-IV GPU and a video decoder (H.264 1080p capable) and encoder (720p) are built into the SoC.

Rockchip RK3188

The Rockchip RK3188 is a fast ARM SoC primarily designed for tablets. It integrates four ARM Cortex A9 cores with NEON extension and a clock speed of up to 1.8 GHz, a Mali-400 MP4 graphics card (up to 600 MHz, 24 GFLOPS) and a low-power (LP-)DDR2/DDR3 memory controller. Due to the high clock rates, the performance of the CPU and GPU is superior to other Cortex-A9 quad-cores such as the Nvidia Tegra 3 and Samsung Exynos 4412. These high frequencies are possible due to the 28nm process (TSMC). However, this results in high power consumption and is thus not suited for compact smartphones.