Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 vs Mediatek Helio X25 MTK6797T

Qualcomm Snapdragon 636

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 (SDM636) is a mid-range octa-core SoC with eight custom Kryo 260 cores at up to 1.8 GHz, an Adreno 509 GPU, a LPDDR4-2666 memory controller (1333 MHz) and a X12 LTE (Cat 12/13, 300 Mbps down, 150 Mbps up) modem. Furthermore, the chip supports 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0. It is manufactured in 14nm FinFet. Qualcomm states a 40% faster performance compared to the old Snapdragon 630 (8x ARM Cortex-A53).

Mediatek Helio X25 MTK6797T

The Mediatek Helio X25 MT6797T is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2016. It is manufactured in a 20 nm process and is equipped with 10 CPU cores. Two fast Cortex-A72 cores are running at up to 2.5 GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 2 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.55 GHz. All cores support 64-bit and the utilization of three clusters is supposed to improve efficiency according to Mediatek. The two A72 cores are only designed for short "Burst-Performance scenarios" according to Mediatek and are probably not used for sustained workloads. Compared to the similar Helio X20, the X25 offers faster clocked CPU and GPU cores.

The integrated ARM Mali T880 MP4 GPU is clocked at up to 850 MHz and has four cluster (from 16) from the Midgard (4th Gen) architecture.

The chip also includes an LTE modem (Cat. 6 300/50 Mbps, DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, EDGE, CDMA2000, ...) as well as a WLAN 802.11ac (280 Mbps) modem. GPS/Glonass/BeiDou is supported for location. The integrated video encoder can handle up to 4Kx2K H.265 at 30 fps and HDR. The SoC can also decode H.265, H.264 and VP9 in 4K30. 

Power Consumption

The processor is manufactured in a 20 nm process at TSMC and should have an average power consumption under load.