Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8260 vs Apple A6 vs UNISOC Tiger T310

Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8260

The Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 MSM8260 is an entry level SoC for smartphones and tablets (mostly Android based). It contains two Scorpion cores (enhanced ARM Cortex-A8) clocked at up to 1.5 GHz, a Adreno 220 graphics card and radio elements. Compared to the similar MSM8660, the 8260 does not include support for CDMA2000.

The similar named MSM8260A already contains the faster Krait cores and the slightly faster Adreno 225 graphics card.

Apple A6

The Apple A6 is a dual-core SoC found in the iPhone 5 with ARM compatible CPU cores. The A6 was developed by Apple and supports the extended ARMv7s instruction set. The clock rate of the CPU is between 800 to 1200 MHz depending on the CPU load. The integrated GPU is a PowerVR SGX543MP3 at 266 MHz.

UNISOC Tiger T310

The Unisoc Tiger T310 is a SoC for smartphones and tablets of the entry level. It was first announced in mid 2019 and integrates four CPU cores (quad core). One big Cortex-A75 core clocked at up to 2 GHz and three small A55 cores with up to 1.8 GHz.

Furthermore, the chip integrates an LTE modem (Cat 7, TDD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TDSCDMA, WCDMA, CDMA, GSM), Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi b/g/n/ac. The integrated ISP supports up to two cameras (16 MPixel and 8 Mpixel, maximum 30 fps video capture) and the GNSS can use all current standards (GPS, Glonass, Beidou, Galileo).

The memory controller is able to drive LPDDR3 at 933 MHz and faster LPDDR4x at 1333 MHz.

The PowerVR GE8300 iGPU is from Imagination and clocked at up to 800 MHz.

The chip is produced in 12nm at TSMC and should offer a rather good power efficiency (for 2019).