Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 vs Mediatek Helio G37 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936

Qualcomm Snapdragon 439

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 439 (SD439) is a lower mainstream SoC for (Android based) smartphones and tablets. Compared to the older Snapdragon 435, the 439 is now manufactured in the current 12nm FinFET process and offers higher clock speeds of 2 GHz of the eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores (compared to 1.4 GHz). Wifi (now ac Wave 2 / Wifi 5) and Bluetooth (v5) were also updated, however the GPU still is the rather slow Adreno 505 and the LTE modem was even downgraded to a X6 with only Cat. 4/5 (max. 150 Mbps download, 75 Mbps upload).

Thanks to the higher maximum clock speed, the performance of the Snapdragon 439 mobile platform can reach the old Snapdragon 625 (also 2 GHz with 8x Cortex-A53). However, there is still a big gap to the SoCs with bigger performance cores.

Mediatek Helio G37

The Mediatek Helio G37 is an entry level ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in late 2020. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 8 ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz. They are divided in two clusters, with the four efficiency cores only clock up to 1.8 GHz. Compared to the similar Helio G35, the G37 offers support for 90 Hz displays and 8 GB RAM.

The performance of the G37 is positioned in the entry level and especially the single core performance is very slow due to the small A53 cores and no big performance cores.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a LTE Cat.4 modem, a Wi-Fi 5 / Bluetooth 5.0 modem, a LPDDR3-933 / LPDDR4-1200 / LPDDR4x-1600 memory controller, a IMG PowerVR GE8320 graphics card, and a 1080p30 video de- and encoder (H.265 decoding, H.264 encoding).

The G37 is produced in 12nm FinFET.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936 is a mid-range ARMv8-based SoC largely for Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in February 2014, the S610 is one of the first 64-bit capable SoCs from Qualcomm. In addition to 4 Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.7 GHz, the SoC integrates an Adreno 405 GPU with a 2x 32-bit memory controller (LPDDR3-1600, 12.8 GB/s) and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac), Bluetooth 4.0, UMTS and LTE.

CPU

The Cortex-A53 is the successor to the very popular Cortex-A7 design. In addition to the new 64-bit capable ARMv8 ISA, the cores offer a variety of other improvements such as better branch prediction. This leads to a significantly higher performance per clock, which is even above the older Cortex-A9.

The four cores of the Snapdragon 610 are clocked at up to 1.7 GHz, offering a performance similar to that of the older Snapdragon 600 (Krait architecture).

GPU

Another new feature is the integrated graphics unit named Adreno 405 (550 MHz). The Adreno 400 series has been substantially redesigned and supports DirectX 11.2 (FL 11_1) including hardware tessellation, OpenGL ES 3.1, and OpenCL 1.2. Furthermore, the performance has been significantly improved, which is now similar to the Adreno 320 and PowerVR G6200.

Features

The Snapdragon 610 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 and WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac as well as a Multi-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 4 (up to 150 Mbps), WCDMA, CDMA, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE.

The SoC can encode and decode 1080p videos using dedicated hardware and stream content to displays with up to 2560 x 1600 pixels. A large number of video codecs including H.265 (playback only) will be supported. The camera ISP can handle sensors with up to 21 MP.

Power Consumption

The Snapdragon 610 is manufactured by TSMC in a 28 nm LP process. According to the specifications, we expect a medium power consumption for use in medium-sized smartphones and tablets.