Nvidia Tegra X1 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

Nvidia Tegra X1

The NVIDIA Tegra X1 (Tegra 6, Codename Erista) is a 64-Bit high performance ARM based SoC (System on a Chip) for (mainly Android based) tablets and embedded systems (like cars). It contains four ARM Cortex A57 and four ARM Cortex A53 cores in the processor part. As a graphics card, Nvidia integrated a Maxwell based GPU with 256 CUDA cores (see for more details and benchmarks). The integrated memory controller supports LPDDR3 and LPDDR4 with a maximum bandwidth of 25.6 GB/s (2x 32 Bit LPDDR4-3200). The Tegra X1 is the successor to the exactly one year earlier announced Tegra K1 SoC.

Similar to the Symsung Exynos 5433, the Tegra X1 uses a big.LITTLE combination of four power saving and small Cortex-A53 cores and four powerful Cortex-A57 cores. Nvidia however uses an own cluster migration solution instead of the ARM Global Task Scheduling (GTS) and therefore only one of the two quad-core clusters is active at a time.

The performance of the processor cores should be in the high-end segment of ARM based SoCs. Nvidia states that the X1 offers a twice as high energy efficiency compared to the Exynos 5433 (same ARM cores at 1.9 GHz manufactured in 20nm).

Due to the big Maxwell graphics card the SoC is mainly aimed at tablets with good cooling solutions and wont be commonly seen in smartphones. The Tegra X1 is produced at TSMC in 20nm.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Mobile Compute Platform (or SD850) is a ARM based SoC for Windows laptops. It is a higher clocked version (3 versus 2.8 GHz) of the Snapdragon 845 for smartphones and also manufactured in 10 nm LPP FinFET at TSMC. It integrates 4x Kryo 385 cores (Cortex-A75) at up to 2.95 GHz (max) for performance and 4x Kryo 385 (at 1.8 GHz?) for efficiency. Furthermore offers an X20 LTE modem (Cat. 18 1.2 Gbps downlink, Cat 13 150 Mbps uplink), ac-WiFi and a dual-channel 32-Bit 1866 MHz LPDDR4x memory controller.

The performance of the Snapdragon 850 in Windows is in theory similar to a Intel Core i5 of the Y-series (e.g. Core i5-7y54). However, this is only the case for native ARM64 compiled applications and games. 32-bit applications that are not compiled for the ARM architecture only run in an emulation and perform much worse (e.g. see Cinebench R11.5 benchmark). 64-bit Intel/AMD apps are not supported at all.

The chip is very power efficient as its produced at TSMC in the modern 10nm LPP process. Therefore, laptops using the Snapdragon 850 can be passively cooled (no fan) and should not throttle under constant load.