Rockchip RK3288 vs Apple A6x vs MediaTek Helio X27 MT6797X

Rockchip RK3288

The Rockchip RK3288 is a mid-range ARM SoC for Android and Chrome OS mobile systems. It integrates four Cortex-A12 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz. ARM calls these cores Cortex-A17 due to them having very similar performance levels. The SoC includes an ARM Mali-T760 MP4 (also called Mali-T764) GPU clocked at 600 MHz and a dual-channel DDR3, DDR3L, LPDDR2, LPDDR3 memory controller.

The ARM Cortex-A12 is the successor to the Cortex-A9 and is based on a 32 Bit ARMv7-A microarchitecture. A single A12 core should be roughly 40 % more powerful than an A9 core according to ARM.

The integrated video engine supports encoding of H.264, VP8, and MVC videos up to 1080p. Decoding is supported for videos up to 4K H.264 and 10 Bit H.265.

The chip is manufactured under a 28 nm HKMG process.

Apple A6x

The Apple A6x is a dual-core-SoC (System on a Chip) with ARM compatible CPU cores (ARMv7s instruction set). Both can be clocked at up to 1400 MHz depending on the load. It is used in the iPad 4 and compared to the A6 in the iPhone 5, the A6x offers a faster GPU (PowerVR SGX544MP4).

The CPU-Performance of the A6x is similar to the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro MSM8960T, while the GPU is about as fast as the Adreno 320.

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.