Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G vs Mediatek MT8176

Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 720G (SD730G 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. A fast performance cluster contains two ARM Cortex-A76 cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz (Kryo 465 Gold) and a power efficiency cluster with six small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.8 GHz (Kryo 465 Silver). Depending on the workload only single clusters or all cores can run at different clock speeds.

The differences to the Snapdragon 730(G) Kryo 470 are not known, although the performance is comparable.

The chip includes a range of other features like a fast X15 LTE radio (800 Mbits Cat 15 download), Wi-Fi 6 wireless radios (802.11ax), satellite positioning, USB-C 3.1, Spectra 350L ISP, Hexagon 692 DSP, H.265 video en- and decode, an LPDDR4X-3733 dual-channel memory controller and a Adreno 618 graphics card.

The Snapdragon 720G is manufactured in the modern 8 nm process at Samsung (8LLP).

Mediatek MT8176

The Mediatek MT8176 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC (System on a chip) that was introduced in October 2016 and is primarily used for Android based tablets. It has two fast Cortex-A72 CPU cores running at up to 2.1 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores for power-saving in a big.LITTLE configuration. The graphics unit is based on the IMG Series 6XT (Rogue) and has the designation PowerVR GX6250 clocked at 600 MHz. Among others, the GPU includes a video decoder with 4K and H.265 support (not verified, but was already the case for the older MT8173).

Processor

The biggest highlight of the SoC are the new Cortex-A72 cores, which can be seen as the successors to the Cortex-A57 design. ARM promises much more performance in combination with reduced power consumption, which results in an excellent per-thread performance with the very high maximum clock of 2.4 GHz. The architecture is based on ARMv8-ISA and therefore supports 64-bit.

The four slower, but therefore very frugal Cortex-A53 cores (clocks unknown, probably around 1.4 GHz) are supposed to reduce the power consumption and are always active with light workloads. The big.LITTLE configuration also allows the simultaneous use of all six cores (or any combination of cores from both clusters), so the MT8173 can be called a real hexa-core.

Graphics

The graphics unit is based on Series 6XT (Rogue) from IMG and has the designation PowerVR GX6250. The 2-cluster chip has a unified-shader architecture with a total of 64 FP32 ALUs as well as 4 TMUs. Compared to the MT8173, the clocks were reduced from 700 to 600 MHz, so the gaming performance is a bit lower. High-resolution screens and complex Android games should be powered without bigger problems.