Apple A6 vs Intel Pentium Silver J5040 vs UNISOC Tiger T310

Apple A6

The Apple A6 is a dual-core SoC found in the iPhone 5 with ARM compatible CPU cores. The A6 was developed by Apple and supports the extended ARMv7s instruction set. The clock rate of the CPU is between 800 to 1200 MHz depending on the CPU load. The integrated GPU is a PowerVR SGX543MP3 at 266 MHz.

Intel Pentium Silver J5040

The Intel Pentium Silver J5040 is a quad-core SoC primarily for inexpensive mini-PCs and was announced late 2019. It runs at 2 GHz (base) to 3.2 GHz (single core burst) and is based on the Gemini Lake platform (refresh). Similar to the Apollo Lake predecessor, the chip is manufactured in a 14 nm process with FinFETs but offers slightly improved processor cores, double the amount of L2 cache, a smaller package, a better GPU architecture and a partly integrated WiFi support. Besides four CPU cores, the chip also includes a DirectX 12 capable GPU as well as a DDR4/LPDDR4 memory controller (dual-channel, up to 2400 MHz). The SoC is not replaceable as it is directly soldered to the mainboard.

Architecture

The processor architecture is still called Goldmont Plus. Compared to the older Goldmont cores in Apollo Lake, they feature an increased level 2 cache (to 4 MB). That means the per-clock-performance should be a bit better, but not near the Core CPUs like Kaby Lake Y.

Performance

Thanks to the higher clock speed and TDP, the Pentium J5040 is slightly faster than the mobile counterpart, the Pentium Silver N5030. Compare to AMD, it ranks on average slightly higher compared to the Athlon Silver 3050e (Zen based Dual-Core) that wins in single-core tests but looses out in multi-threaded tests. Intel Core i3 from 2019 (like the i3-1005G1) are clearly faster and win even in multi-threaded tests easily although being only dual-core CPUs.

GPU Performance

The UHD Graphics 605 (Gemini Lake) is based on Intel's Gen9 architecture, which supports DirectX 12 and is also used for the Kaby Lake / Skylake / Apollo Lake graphics adapters (like HD Graphics 520). Equipped with 18 EUs and a clock of up to 800 MHz, the performance should be roughly on par with the older HD Graphics 5300 and HD Graphics 505 (Apollo Lake).

The chip also includes an advanced video engine with hardware support for the playback of VP9 and H.265 material (8-bit color-depth).

Power Consumption

The J-variant of the Gemini Lake SoCs are specified at 10W TDP and therefore higher than the mobile N variants (6 Watt).

UNISOC Tiger T310

The Unisoc Tiger T310 is a SoC for smartphones and tablets of the entry level. It was first announced in mid 2019 and integrates four CPU cores (quad core). One big Cortex-A75 core clocked at up to 2 GHz and three small A55 cores with up to 1.8 GHz.

Furthermore, the chip integrates an LTE modem (Cat 7, TDD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TDSCDMA, WCDMA, CDMA, GSM), Bluetooth 5.0 and WiFi b/g/n/ac. The integrated ISP supports up to two cameras (16 MPixel and 8 Mpixel, maximum 30 fps video capture) and the GNSS can use all current standards (GPS, Glonass, Beidou, Galileo).

The memory controller is able to drive LPDDR3 at 933 MHz and faster LPDDR4x at 1333 MHz.

The PowerVR GE8300 iGPU is from Imagination and clocked at up to 800 MHz.

The chip is produced in 12nm at TSMC and should offer a rather good power efficiency (for 2019).