Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230 vs NXP i.MX 6SLL vs HiSilicon Kirin 910T

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8230

The Qualcomm MSM8230 (Snapdragon S4 Plus series) is a ARM based high-end smartphone SoC in 2012. It contains two Krait (ARMv7) CPU cores at up to 1.2 GHz, a Adreno 305 GPU, a single channel LPDDR2 memory controller and radio elements.  The chip is produced in 28nm LP (low power process) at TSMC. Compared to the MSM8930, the 8230 lacks LTE.

The Krait cores offer a slightly better performance as the standard Cortex-A9 cores and are compatible to the NEON SIMD extensions.

NXP i.MX 6SLL

The NXP i.MX 6SLL or i.MX6SLL (i.MX 6 Series, MCIMX6V7DVN10AB Part Number) is a single core processor for e-readers. It integrates a single ARM Cortex-A9 processor core clocked at up to 1 GHz and a 2D graphics accelerator called Pixel Processor PXP (including E-INK display controller EPDC with support of up to 2332x1650 and 5-bit greyscale). The integrated memory controller supports up to 400 MHz LPDDR2 or LPDDR3 (32-bit interface). Flash memory can be attached using eMMC 5.0 or SD 3.0 (three connections available). Furthermore, the SoC supports 2x USB 2.0 OTH with PHY. The chip is pin-compatible with the i.MX 6SoloLite which features an additional Vivante GC320 graphics card. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS or other peripherals have to be connected with external chips.

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.