Mediatek Helio X25 MTK6797T vs Samsung Exynos 9609

Mediatek Helio X25 MTK6797T

The Mediatek Helio X25 MT6797T is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2016. It is manufactured in a 20 nm process and is equipped with 10 CPU cores. Two fast Cortex-A72 cores are running at up to 2.5 GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 2 GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at up to 1.55 GHz. All cores support 64-bit and the utilization of three clusters is supposed to improve efficiency according to Mediatek. The two A72 cores are only designed for short "Burst-Performance scenarios" according to Mediatek and are probably not used for sustained workloads. Compared to the similar Helio X20, the X25 offers faster clocked CPU and GPU cores.

The integrated ARM Mali T880 MP4 GPU is clocked at up to 850 MHz and has four cluster (from 16) from the Midgard (4th Gen) architecture.

The chip also includes an LTE modem (Cat. 6 300/50 Mbps, DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, EDGE, CDMA2000, ...) as well as a WLAN 802.11ac (280 Mbps) modem. GPS/Glonass/BeiDou is supported for location. The integrated video encoder can handle up to 4Kx2K H.265 at 30 fps and HDR. The SoC can also decode H.265, H.264 and VP9 in 4K30. 

Power Consumption

The processor is manufactured in a 20 nm process at TSMC and should have an average power consumption under load.

Samsung Exynos 9609

The Samsung Exynos 9609 (or Exynos 7 Series 9609) is a mid-range SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It integrates 8 processor cores in two clusters (big.LITTLE concept). Four ARM Cortex A73 cores at up to 2.2 GHz for demanding tasks and four ARM Cortex A53 at up to 1.6 GHz for power efficiency. Compared to the older Exynos 9610, the 9609 offers 100 MHz less clock speed for both clusters.

The integrated LTE modem supports 4G at up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload. Furthermore, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 are also integrated in the chip.

The on-board ARM Mali-G72 MP3 graphics card offers three clusters and support for Vulkan, DirectX 12 and OpenGL ES 3.2.

The Exynos 9609 is manufactured in the modern 10nm FinFET process and therefore relatively power efficient and also suited for smaller smartphones.