Rockchip RK3288 vs MediaTek MT8161 vs HiSilicon Kirin 650

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.

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).

HiSilicon Kirin 650

The HiSilicon Kirin 650 is an ARM-based octa-core SoC for mid-range smartphones and tablets. It was announced early 2016 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 GHz (performance cores). Furthermore, a ARM Mali-T830 MP2 graphics card (at 600 MHz with 40.8 GFLOPS), 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.