Comparison of Mobile Processors

Snapdragon vs Apple vs MediaTek vs Samsung: Which is the Best Performing Smartphone?

All the “big” fours (Snapdragon, Apple, MediaTek and Samsung) are gunning for a bigger processor market. What is the technical difference?

Let’s filter out marketing noise for now and dive in the actual difference in processor lines.

Cores and GHz: Cores generate heat and they perform most of the critical applications on smartphones. Heat vs performance is an important parameter to check the core selections.

Different companies have different cores with different clock speeds.

The key difference is in the following:

High-performance cores: These cores can perform a large number of operations quickly but they produce greater heat than normal cores. They are reserved for specific high gaming or other resource-intensive tasks.
Efficient cores: They perform normal tasks and produce less heat than high-performance cores. They are preferred over high-performance cores for normal tasks and may even service gaming or video experience with sufficient tweaking.

Clocking is the frequency of computation. It is kept lower than what is marketed to keep the heat low.

For any mobile phone service technician in Kottayam, knowledge of these processors is necessary.

IASE provides mobile phone servicing training that gives in-depth knowledge to various processors and their designs

Architectural Design of different processors:

Most of the designs are provided by the ARM company. This company provides on-demand designs which are customised by engineers for their company-specific CPUs.

ARM currently provides following different designs:

ARMv8-A cortex series: This series can accept 32 bit OR 64-bit instructions.

ARMv7-A cortex series: This is an older series with a 32-bit processor.

ARMv8.2-A cortex series: This is the latest series of processors used from 2018 onwards.

Other differentiating factors:

Combination of GPU, /video encoders and AI co-processors are important factors to consider while comparing smartphone processors.

Production Nodes: Production nodes describe the process used for physical production. Mostly 7nm widths are common now. But earlier processor has widths as wide as 14nm and even 65nm for some earlier processors.

Cluster: Combination of Core and Frequency is a cluster. Ex.

A quad-core system can have the following variation:

One high-performance core at 2.4Ghz and 3 efficient cores at 2Ghz.

Two high-performance cores at 2Ghz and 2 efficient cores at 1.8Ghz.

One high-performance core at 2Ghz, One high-performance core at 1.8Ghz, 2 efficient cores at 1.5GHz.

Note the different combination of processor cores and frequencies in this table.

So if you are planning to be a mobile phone technician having a career in Kottayam, get to know these newbies.

Here is a details comparison based on all the factors we discussed.

	Snapdragon 855	Samsung Exynos 9820	Apple A12 Bionic	Huawei Kirin 980
Architecture	7nm	8nm	7nm	7nm
CPU	1x 2.84GHz, 3x 2.42GHz, 4x 1.80GHz Kyro 485	2x Custom Core + 2x Cortex A75 + 4x Cortex A55	2×2.5GHz Vortex + 4×1.6GHz Tempest	2×2.6 GHz Cortex-A76 + 4×1.8 GHz Cortex-A55 + 2×1.92 GHz Cortex-A76
GPU	Adreno 640	Mali-G76 MP12	4-core Apple GPU	Mali-G76 MP10
Camera support (single lens)	32MP	22MP	12MP	40MP
Camera support (dual lens)	20MP+20MP	16MP+16MP	12MP+12MP	40MP+20MP
Connectivity	LTE Cat.20	LTE Cat.20	LTE Cat.16	LTE Cat.21
NPU on-board	Yes	Yes, Single	Yes, Single	Yes, Dual
Smartphones	OnePlus 7 (expected)	Samsung Galaxy S10 (expected)	Apple iPhone Xs/Xs Max/Xr	Huawei Mate 20 Pro