Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G vs Mediatek Helio G85

Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 870 5G Mobile Platform (SM8250-AC) is a high-end smartphone and tablet SoC that Qualcomm announced in mid 2021. The SoC integrates a fast ‘Prime Core’ that clocks up to 3.2 GHz and three additional ARM Cortex-A77 performance cores, which can reach up to 2.42 GHz. These are complemented by four power-saving ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clock up to a maximum of 1.8 GHz. Compared to the similar and older Snapdragon 865+, the Prime Core clocks 100 MHz faster and the GPU is slightly higher clocked.

Therefore, the Snapdragon 870 is slightly faster than the old Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus and slots in behind the high end Snapdragon 888.

The Mobile Platform integrates a Qualcomm X55 5G modem with Sub-5 and mmWave support and global 5G bands with up to 7.5 GBit/s (download) speed. The SmartConnect 6800 modem supports Wi-Fi 6 with 8x8 MU-MIMU and 60 GHz 11ay up to 10 Gbps. 

The integrated GPU is still called Adreno 650 and offers a slightly higher clock speed of 670 MHz.

The on board Hexagon 698 DSP now offers a KI performance of up to 15 TOPS (up from 7 TOPS in the 855) and still uses a combination of CPU, GPU, HVX and Tensor cores. The Spectra 480 ISP is also untouched. The integrated Computer Vision Engine (CV-ISP) now supports Dolby Vision, 8K videos and 200 megapixel photos.

The built-in memory controller supports LPDDR5 with up to 2,750 MHz and LPDDR4X with 2,133 MHz.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern and power efficient 7nm process.

Mediatek Helio G85

The Mediatek Helio G85 is a mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2020. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and integrates 8 CPU cores. Two fast ARM Cortex-A75 cores with up to 2 GHz for performance tasks and six small ARM Cortex-A55 with up to 1.8 GHz for efficiency. All eight cores can be used together thanks to Heterogeneous Multi-Processing support. The integrated GPU is a ARM Mali-G52 MC2 (MP2) with two clusters at up to 1000 MHz (up from 950 MHz from the otherwise similar Helio G80). The SoC also integrates the HyperEngine that handles a dynamic management of CPU, GPU and memory.

The SoC integrates furthermore a LTE radio with Cat-7 (download) / Cat-13 (upload) support, Wifi 5 (ac), Bluetooth 5.0, LPDDR4x 1800 MHz and eMMC 5.1 storage.