Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 vs Mediatek Helio P90

Qualcomm Snapdragon 660

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 (SD660) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in mid 2017, the SD660 is the successor to the Snapdragon 625. It features 8 Kryo 260 cores (custom design, 64-Bit capable) that are divided in two clusters. A fast cluster of four cores with up to 2.2 GHz and a power saving efficiency cluster with up to 1.8 GHz. Both clusters can also used together.

In addition to the 8 CPU cores, the SoC integrates a mid range Adreno 512 GPU with a LPDDR4 memory controller (dual-channel 1866 MHz)  and supports Wi-Fi (802.11ac + MIMO, max. 867 Mbps), Bluetooth 5, and LTE (X12 LTE modem with up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload).

Performance

In Benchmarks of the Oppo R11, the CPU part of the Snapdragon SD660 performs between former high end Socs like the Snapdragon 821 in the Pixel XL and the Snapdragon 835. The graphics performance is however much lower, as the Adreno 512 is only a slight upgrade of the older Adreno 510 (due to the higher clock speed).

CPU

The Snapdragon 660 is based on a similar concept as ARM's big.LITTLE, which combines a low power CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 1.8 GHz) and a performance CPU cluster (2x Kyro clocked at up to 2.2 GHz). The clock speed of each cluster can be individually adjusted (but not per core) and the lowest clock speed is 310 MHz (unverified).

Power Consumption

Thanks to the new 14 nm process, the energy efficiency has been improved noticeably compared to its 20 nm predecessors.

Mediatek Helio P90

The Mediatek Helio P90 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2019. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET (12FFC) process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A75 cores (2.2 GHz max.) and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (2 GHz max.) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The processor also integrates a Cat-12 (600 Mbps DL) / Cat-13 (150 Mbps UL) LTE Modem (4G), a PowerVR GM 9446 GPU, and ISP for 64 MP photos and 4K videorecording, and a AI Processing Unit with a theoretical performance of 1165 Giga-Multiply-Adds per second. The memory controller on the die supports dual-channel LPDDR4x-1866 (8 GB max.) and flash memory can be connected by UFS 2.1.

The CPU performance should be slightly below a Snapdragon 730 (e.g. in the Reno2 Z in our benchmarks) and therefore in the upper middle-class of 2019 smartphones.