HiSilicon Kirin 650 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936

HiSilicon Kirin 650

The HiSilicon Kirin 650 is an ARM-based octa-core SoC for mid-range smartphones and tablets. It was announced early 2016 and features eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores. Four cores can be clocked with up to 1.7 GHz (power saving cores) and four with up to 2 GHz (performance cores). Furthermore, a ARM Mali-T830 MP2 graphics card (at 600 MHz with 40.8 GFLOPS), a 64-Bit LPDDR3 memory controller and a dual-sim capable LTE Cat. 6 (max. 300 MBit/s and GSM, WCDMA, UMTS, HSPA+) radio are integrated in the SoC.

The processor performance can be compared with the older Kirin 930 and therefore sufficient for daily usage as browsing and non demanding apps. High-end SoCs with Cortex-A57 or A72 cores however should be noticeably faster.

The SoC is produced in a modern 16nm FinFET process and is therefore very power efficient.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 610 MSM8936 is a mid-range ARMv8-based SoC largely for Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in February 2014, the S610 is one of the first 64-bit capable SoCs from Qualcomm. In addition to 4 Cortex-A53 CPU cores at up to 1.7 GHz, the SoC integrates an Adreno 405 GPU with a 2x 32-bit memory controller (LPDDR3-1600, 12.8 GB/s) and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac), Bluetooth 4.0, UMTS and LTE.

CPU

The Cortex-A53 is the successor to the very popular Cortex-A7 design. In addition to the new 64-bit capable ARMv8 ISA, the cores offer a variety of other improvements such as better branch prediction. This leads to a significantly higher performance per clock, which is even above the older Cortex-A9.

The four cores of the Snapdragon 610 are clocked at up to 1.7 GHz, offering a performance similar to that of the older Snapdragon 600 (Krait architecture).

GPU

Another new feature is the integrated graphics unit named Adreno 405 (550 MHz). The Adreno 400 series has been substantially redesigned and supports DirectX 11.2 (FL 11_1) including hardware tessellation, OpenGL ES 3.1, and OpenCL 1.2. Furthermore, the performance has been significantly improved, which is now similar to the Adreno 320 and PowerVR G6200.

Features

The Snapdragon 610 offers numerous wireless technologies such as Bluetooth 4.0 and WLAN 802.11a/b/g/n/ac as well as a Multi-SIM cellular modem supporting LTE cat. 4 (up to 150 Mbps), WCDMA, CDMA, EV-DO, TD-SCDMA and GSM/EDGE.

The SoC can encode and decode 1080p videos using dedicated hardware and stream content to displays with up to 2560 x 1600 pixels. A large number of video codecs including H.265 (playback only) will be supported. The camera ISP can handle sensors with up to 21 MP.

Power Consumption

The Snapdragon 610 is manufactured by TSMC in a 28 nm LP process. According to the specifications, we expect a medium power consumption for use in medium-sized smartphones and tablets.