MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X vs HiSilicon Kirin 659

MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X

The Mediatek Helio X27 MT6797X is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based). It is manufactured in a 20 nm process and is equipped with 10 CPU cores. Two fast Cortex-A72 cores are running at up to 2.6 GHz (performance), four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 2 GHz (balanced) and four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.6 GHz (efficiency). All cores support 64-bit and the utilization of three clusters is supposed to improve efficiency according to Mediatek. The two A72 cores are only designed for short "Burst-Performance scenarios" according to Mediatek and are probably not used for sustained workloads. Compared to the similar named MT6797, the MT6797X was introduced later and offers higher clock speeds for CPU and GPU.

The integrated ARM Mali T880 MP4 (according to Wikipedia) GPU is clocked at up to 875 MHz and has four cluster (from 16) from the Midgard (4th Gen) architecture.

The chip also includes an LTE modem (Cat. 6 300/50 Mbps, DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, EDGE, CDMA2000, ...) as well as a WLAN 802.11ac (280 Mbps) modem. GPS/Glonass/BeiDou is supported for location. The integrated video encoder can handle up to 4Kx2K H.265 at 30 fps and HDR. The SoC can also decode H.265, H.264 and VP9 in 4K30. 

Power Consumption

The processor is manufactured in a 20 nm process at TSMC and should have an average power consumption under load.

HiSilicon Kirin 659

The HiSilicon Kirin 659 is an ARM-based octa-core SoC for mid-range smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2017 and features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores. Four cores can be clocked with up to 1.7 GHz (power saving cores) and four with up to 2.36 GHz (performance cores). The difference to the older Kirin 650 and Kirin 655 SoCs is the higher clock speed of the performance cores (2.35 versus 2.1 and 2.0 GHz). The slightly older Kirin 658 is very similar. The 659 is in our benchmarks around 4% faster than the 658 and offers a better LTE radio (Cat. 13).

Furthermore, a ARM Mali-T830 MP2 graphics card (at >=900 MHz), a 64-Bit LPDDR3 memory controller and a dual-sim capable LTE Cat. 6 (max. 300 MBit/s and GSM, WCDMA, UMTS, HSPA+) radio are integrated in the SoC. The processor performance can be compared with the older Kirin 930 and therefore sufficient for daily usage as browsing and non demanding apps. High-end SoCs with Cortex-A57 or A72 cores however should be noticeably faster. The SoC is produced in a modern 16nm FinFET process and is therefore very power efficient.