MediaTek MT8161 vs Renesas MP5232 vs HiSilicon Kirin 910T

MediaTek MT8161

The MediaTek MT8161 is an ARM based entry-level to mid-range SoC for (Android based) tablets. It offers four ARM Cortex-A53 processor cores (quad-core) that are clocked with up to 1.3 GHz. Furthermore, an ARM Mali-720 graphics card, a LPDDR3 memory controller (e.g., accessing 1 GB in the Lenovo Tab 2 A8-50), Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 802.11 b/g/n are integrated in the SoC.

The performance is situated in the entry level of 2015 and often similar to the Kirin 910T (see benchmark below).

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.