Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8930 vs Rockchip RK3188 vs NXP i.MX 6SLL

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8930

The Qualcomm MSM8930 (Snapdragon S4 Plus series) is an 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 LTE radio elements.  The chip is produced in 28nm LP (low power process) at TSMC. Compared to the MSM8960, the 8930 is lower clocked, offers only a single channel memory controller, but has a faster GPU.

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

Rockchip RK3188

The Rockchip RK3188 is a fast ARM SoC primarily designed for tablets. It integrates four ARM Cortex A9 cores with NEON extension and a clock speed of up to 1.8 GHz, a Mali-400 MP4 graphics card (up to 600 MHz, 24 GFLOPS) and a low-power (LP-)DDR2/DDR3 memory controller. Due to the high clock rates, the performance of the CPU and GPU is superior to other Cortex-A9 quad-cores such as the Nvidia Tegra 3 and Samsung Exynos 4412. These high frequencies are possible due to the 28nm process (TSMC). However, this results in high power consumption and is thus not suited for compact smartphones.

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.