MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X vs Renesas MP5232 vs Marvell PXA986

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.

Marvell PXA986

The Marvell PXA986 is an ARM based dual-core SoC for smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It contains two Cortex-A9 CPU cores usually clocked around 1.2 GHz and a Vivante GC1000 graphics card. The integrated video processor is able to handle 720p30 content in H.263, H.264 BP and MPEG4 SP encoding. Furthermore, a GSM/EDGE/WCDMA/HSDPA radio is included in the chip.