MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X vs Renesas MP5232 vs HiSilicon Kirin 910T

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.

Renesas MP5232

The Renesas MP5232 is an entry level ARM Cortex-A9 dual-core SoC with integrated LTE cat. 4 radio. It aims at "cheap" Android based smartphones with LTE between 150 and 300 Dollars. Both CPU cores are clocked at up to 1.5 GHz, although e.g. in the Samsung Galaxy Core LTE SM-G386F they are limited to 1.2 GHz. In addition to the ARM processor cores, the MP5232 features a PowerVR SGX544 graphics card, LTE cat. 4 / DC-HSPA+ 3G / Edge radio, 1080p video de- and encoder, and a 20 MP ISP.

HiSilicon Kirin 910T

The HiSilicon Kirin 910T 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 1.8 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 910 is a 200 MHz slower clocked (CPU) version.

At the time of announcement in mid 2014, the CPU performance of the Kirin910T 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.