Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Silicon Wars: Snapdragon vs Exynos vs Apple vs Kirin vs MediaTek”.
Hey there, my name’s gary sims – and this is andrew authority – now we’re well into 2021 and we know very well the flagship processes that are going to power, the phones for the rest of this year and maybe even a little bit of 2022.. So what are they? Of course we’ve got the snapdragon 888 we’ve got the xnos 2100 we’ve got the kirin 9000. We’Ve got the apple a14 and we’ve got the mediatek 1200. So how do they compare? How do they stack up one against the other? Well, if you want to find out more, please let me explain so there are different ways: we can analyze these processes. Of course, there’s not only raw performance, there’s efficiency, there’s the media capabilities, there’s the connectivity capabilities, the 5g modem, so we’ll try and look at all the different aspects and see which one which chipset is better than the others in the different areas. Now, of course, we’re talking about four chip sets that run for android devices and one that is for the iphone. So of course it depending on the android phone you buy, depending on which chips that you get and then also, of course, which features you get with.
That chipset with the iphone, then there really is just kind of one offering some different sizes and things like that, but basically you’re getting the same chipset in each of those phones. So, what’s the first thing we can say about these chipsets first thing we can say is they’re all built using a five nanometer process, with the exception of the mediatek, which is built using a six nanometer process from tsmc i mentioned tsmc. There are basically two main uh fabrication plants, the plants at the factories that build the actual chips themselves.
They don’t design them, they’re, not responsible for. What’S in the chips you just they get given their the the uh, the transistor layoutness and they’re, told to manufacture those things. Now one is samsung and they have a five nanometer process and the other is tsmc now in terms of density. In terms of how many transistors you can pack into those little uh chips, tsmc’s is actually a bit more advanced than samsung. Now samsung make the exynos 2100 as you would expect their own processor and they also make the snapdragon 888. the iphone and the kirin and the mediatech are all using tsmc’s process. But, as i said, the mediatek is using the six nanometer process rather than the five nanometer process. So why is the process mode important? Because a better process node gives you better efficiency, less heat produced and therefore more performance. Now all of the five nanometer offerings are better than the seven nanometer offerings that we had in the previous generation. So let’s turn our attention to the cpus. Now this year, four of our five uh chipsets are using a design, cpu designs that come directly from arm. So samsung and qualcomm and huawei and mediatek are all using arm design. Cpu cores only apple this year is using its own cpu design, which it does in-house, has to pass various certification to make sure it’s fully compatible, but it is not taken from any of arm’s designs. It’S done all in-house by their own engineers. Now, looking at the four companies that are using arm design, cpu calls we need to understand.
There are actually four different types of cpu design here that we’re talking about with different performance characteristics, different generations. So it’s important to understand them. So, first off we’ll look at the cortex x1. The cortex x1 is the bleeding edge fastest cpu design that arm have publicly released to date and you’ll find that in the exynos 2100 and you’ll find it in the snapdragon 888.
Now, normally there’s only one of those cores, because it’s a bit faster does use a bit more battery life. So it’s kind of backed up by some other cores that are slightly slower but offer greater performance. But you still get that single thread that boost when you need something to happen quickly. There’S that high performance core there, the x1 to give you that fastest performance.
On the moment when you come to multi-core, when you come to long-term multi-threaded kind of applications, then the other core’s kicking. So that’s the x1 that you’ll find in the samsung and the qualcomm. Now supporting the x1, you get the cortex, a78 and you’ll find the cortex a78 in the qualcomm in the samsung and also in the mediatek.
So there’s normally three of these cortex a78 cores that work together with the cortex x1. They complement the x1. So really a three plus one quad core setup. Now the only difference is in the mediatek 1200. They don’t have access to the x1 they’re, not part of that program.
So instead for the x instead of the x1 they’ve got a quartis a78 clocked at 3. Gigahertz. Now i haven’t mentioned the kirin 9000 until now, and that’s because it’s not using the x1 or the cortex a78, it’s actually using the cortex a77. So that’s the previous generation of chip. Again in a one plus three set up the one of the causes clocked at 3.1 gigahertz then the other three cores are clocked slightly lower, still giving you that quad core set up for the high performance part of the cpu.
Now all of these cpus, including apples, are heterogeneous, meaning there is one set of cores for high performance and another set of cores for power efficiency. So all of the chips in the range, except for the apple, are using the cortex a55, four of them at different clock frequencies from around 1.8 to 2 gigahertz to offer that power efficiency when you’re not doing very much stuff. For example, if you’re watching a youtube video, all the cpu needs to do is kind of talk to the wi-fi stuff talk to the cellular stuff, get the data and then pass it over to the video decoding chip not much stuff going on, not much cpu power.
Being used and that’s a perfect example of why you’d want to use a power efficiency core, because it’s not having to do any hard work, just a bit of data shuffling, really as that video is being decoded. However, when you’re calls playing a game when of course, you’re doing other stuff, then of course you want those high performance courses where they kick in render your web page display the game whatever it is, use the photo editing, app they’re using and they’re there to help For that, so that all these cpus have eight cores in total, except for the iphone which has six cores in total two high performance cores four power efficiency calls and people often write to me in the comments you see how clever apple are. They can do all that with just two calls. Imagine if they used eight calls and of course the point is they can’t use eight cores, because those two cores are very, very, let’s call them fat inside of the iphone. They can’t put another two cores in there, because that really would kill it in terms of battery and in terms of overheating. That’S why you see more cores now in the m1 based macbooks, because there, with a bigger battery with a bigger area for dissipating the heat. Our apple are able to put the bigger calls in there, but they certainly can’t put that into an iphone it just wouldn’t fly. However, their design choice is to go with two bigger fatter cores that can achieve more, but they’re bigger and they use more heat, and so they only need two of them and they’ve done that kind of equation. That balancing out and they’ve worked out that those two bigger cores are better than four cores that can do less and in terms of overall performance, we have to say that the uh a14 uh is it beats everybody else, there’s absolutely no doubt about it and that’s Been double proved again, when you see the performance of the macbooks, with the m1 processor in them and if you’re looking just at the android chips, then the exynos 2100 in terms of cpu design, is just slightly ahead of the snapdragon 888. When it comes to the gpu again, we have a whole range of different options. Available qualcomm uses the its own in-house, designed adreno gpu, something it designed it owned and it puts inside of its own processors. The same with apple apple are also using its own in-house gpu.
In terms of the heritage of both those gpus, then we know that the qualcomm gpu did have a heritage. Many many years ago, from amd when corcoran bought amd’s completely bought its mobile graphics unit and, of course, on the apple side. Apple have had a long, sometimes turbulent relationship with imagination, technology and its power.
Vr gpus, but essentially those are both in-house design, gpus owned by the two respective companies. Now the other chips all use gpus from arm. That’S the mali gpu and there are two different types of gpu being used: the mali g78 and the mali g77 and obviously the g78 is a newer generation than the g77.
Now you’ll find a 14 core mali g78 in the exynos 2100 you’ll find a 24 core mali g78 in the kirin, 9000 and you’ll find a 9 core g77 in the media tech demensity 1200.. Now some people say wow 20 24 cores in the kirin. It must be so much faster than the x 2100. Well, no, not really, because if you think about it, adding that 10 extra cores would really kill the battery. You can’t just throw in 10 cores and say: there’s no consequence that there is battery. There is heat. So it’s probable, although i’ve not ever been able to verify this, it is probable. They are clocked at quite a lower clock frequency to maintain that thermal budget that power envelope, so you don’t exceed the heat and exceed the battery requirements driving all those 24 cores. And it’s probably the exynos 2100 is their clock at a higher clock rate.
So, of course, again, you’ve got these checks and balance. What’S better higher clock rate and less cores or more calls at a lower clock rate. What gives the best overall performance and each company has made its choice so, to give a brief talk about the overall performance, we can definitely say, as i mentioned earlier, that the apple a14 is definitely the king when it comes to performance and when it comes to Performance amongst the android chips, then, basically, looking at the snapdragon 888 is the winner, because it has a better gpu than the exynos 2100. Although the 2100 does have a slight lead in terms of pure raw cpu performance, we’ll quickly mention ai, of course, ai inference. That means seeing something and inferring guessing what it is.
So you know is it a cat? Is it a car? Is it food, you know all the stuff you kind of get built to the camera apps, and this is extending more and more face recognition and so on. All of the chipsets offer their own uh kind of neural engines or their neural processing unit. Artificial intelligence processing depends on how they want to call them, and they are all increasingly offering more and more performance. What is difficult today is to actually get a precise figure on what that performance is.
They do talk about tops. That’S trillions of operations per second, however, tops can also be a bit meaningless because you don’t know what those operations are doing and how much you can achieve with those millions of operations and so certainly going forward. We are going to see more and more benchmarks being developed and becoming trusted to kind of analyze the ai.
But at the moment we can safely say that all the chips are increasing their ai capabilities and they are certainly helping in things like the camera, apps and so on, so that different scenes can be recognized. Different filters can be applied when necessary, face unlock security. Things they’ve all got it and they’re all getting better at it, so the launch of the iphone 12.
Of course, we’ve now got 5g in apple’s range, which means we’ve got 5g support across all of these chipsets. Now now there are some differences in what 5g means. For example, there are integrated modems, which means the logic that you need to drive. The modem is actually inside the soc, of course, the antennas and the rf part.
The radio frequency part, of course, are external, but the bits to drive the actual modem are inside the soc. That’S true across all of the chips, except for apple, who are still using an external modem, which means there’s another chip on the board and the soc talks to that chip. And then, of course it talks to the radio and so on. And, of course, there are different frequency ranges. Sub six is kind of similar to what you had with 4g lte and it’s the thing that will get rolled out first in most 5g deployments, because it kind of complements what’s already there for 4g lte and it offers the same kind of distance and range.
And so on, but of course, greater data throughput then there’s also millimeter wave, which is really aimed at more urban areas. You need more base stations, more transmitters and receivers, very good for inside conference, centers inside shopping centers and inside city centers. However, once you get outside of an urban area, you’ll be switching back to sub 6.. Now all of the chipsets support sub six and millimeter wave, with the exception of the mediatek 1200, which only supports sub six and finally to wrap it all up course. Don’T forget, there are other things like the wi-fi connectivity, the bluetooth, the video decoding and encoding – how many cameras can be connected. Of course, that differs very much from each of these chipsets and, of course, then, in which phone they end up, because a chipset may support.
Let’S say triple camera, but you might get a phone with only one lens or two on it. So just having the chipset capabilities doesn’t guarantee you’re going to have it in the device. Okay, that’s it.
My name is gary sims. This is android authority. I really recommend that you check out our newsletter. We’Ve got a whole range of newsletters daily, weekly monthly, including the gary explains newsletter, which covers everything i’m doing over here on android authority and over on the garry explains channel. I do think you’ll find it really useful head over to androidauthority.com newsletters to sign up over there. No spam just informative newsletters. Well, i really hope you liked this video. If you did, please do give it a thumbs up also don’t rely on the youtube recommendation algorithm. It may not show these videos all the time.
Best thing to do is subscribe and click that bell notification: icon. Okay, that’s it i’ll see in the next one. You .