Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 vs Mediatek Helio G96

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 (SM7450-AB Mobile Platform) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates eight cores (octa-core) divided into two clusters. Four fast cores based on the ARM Cortex-A710 architecture with up to 2.4 GHz and four additional A510 based cores with up to 1.8 GHz in a power efficiency cluster.

According to ARM, the performance cores are 10 percent faster and 35 percent more efficient than the old  Cortex-A78 cores. The efficiency cores are supposed to be 35 percent more powerful and 20 percent more efficient than the old Cortex-A55 cores. The Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 supports up to 16 GB of LPDDR5-3200 RAM and UFS-3.1 flash memory. The SoC uses the integrated Adreno 644 for graphics card.

The Adreno graphics chip supports HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision as well as HLG and relies on a hardware-accelerated H.265 and VP9 decoder. The 7th generation Qualcomm AI Engine offers features like Camera Deep Learning Face Detect (DLFD) and Video Super Resolution (VSR).

The Qualcomm Spectra Triple ISP (Image Signal Processor) enables three cameras to capture photos and videos simultaneously. The chip supports 200-megapixel cameras as well as 4K HDR video recording. 

The Snapdragon X62 5G modem integrated in the SoC allows simultaneous data transfers of 5G-mmWave as well as sub-6 GHz, enabling bandwidths of up to 4.4 GBit/s. Qualcomm's FastConnect 6700 is responsible for local communication, which supports Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi 6E, among other things. Speeds of up to 2.9 GBit/s are to be achieved via Wi-Fi 6E.

The SoC is manufactured in a modern 4 nm process at Samsung.

Mediatek Helio G96

The Mediatek Helio G96 is a mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2021. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.05 GHz and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (max. 2 GHz) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The chip integrates an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 (two cores) clocked at up to 950 MHz. Compared to the similar Helio G95, the G96 offers a slower GPU but supports 120 Hz displays (G95 90 Hz).

Furthermore, the integrated LTE modem supports Cat-12 600 Mbps download and Cat-13 150 Mbps upload speeds. Wi-Fi 5 is also integrated (a/b/g/n/ac). The memory controller supports LPDDR3 and LPDDR4x with up to 2,133 MHz with up to 10 GB capacity.