Top four smartphone high-end SoC analysis | Iooku - 上海419贵族宝贝-上海后花园1314-上海品茶网-阿拉爱上海

The rapid development of smart phones has exceeded most people's imagination. 2012 can be called the "four core year", and many high-end smart phones have used four core processors and high-definition screens. This year, SoC has developed into the generation of Cortex-A15, and the processing performance of mobile phones has made a qualitative leap. What are the powerful processors in 2013?

Samsung

Samsung is the first manufacturer in the world to put Cortex-A15 chip into mobile phones. The first product is the famous Galaxy S4, which uses the new Orion Exynos 5410 chip and adopts the "4+4 core" big LITTLE architecture. Because of the particularity of this architecture, many people say that Exynos 5410 is a "pseudo eight core". In fact, this architecture is a compromise to the A15's ultra-high power consumption. If only A15 is used, it will directly lead to high temperature and power consumption during daily use. Therefore, working with Cortex-A7 with low frequency and low power consumption can improve this problem to a certain extent. The Exynos 5410 uses the PowerVR SGX544MP3, with the frequency up to 533MHz. When it was launched, the GPU performance was almost unmatched. Although the parameters are very strong, the Exynos 5410 still encounters many problems when it comes to mobile phones. Due to the small heat dissipation space on the Galaxy S4, the SoC itself is very hot and frequency reduced. The SGX5 series itself cannot fully support OpenGL ES 3.0, so it has become "insufficient" in the period of Android 4.3.

With the release of Note 3, Samsung has finally applied the second chip Exynos 5420 of the second Exynos 5 OCTA series to mobile phones. This SoC still uses the 4+4 architecture, but its frequency is higher than that of the previous generation. The highest frequency of Cortex-A15 is 1.9 GHz. On the GPU, the latest ARM Mali-T628mp6 has been replaced, and its performance is close to Adreno 330. The comprehensive performance of the Exynos 5420 is particularly outstanding in this generation of SoC. Both CPU and GPU performance are quite strong, and the support for 4K video is relatively weak.

Apple

It has always been thought that Apple does not pay attention to hardware configuration. In fact, Apple is silently challenging the peak of hardware. This generation of iOS devices uses the A7 processor. This SoC has unprecedented performance. It is also the first ARMv8 instruction set and 64 bit mobile processor. At the same time, its new 28 nanometer process Cyclone core has brought about a significant performance improvement, almost twice the performance level under the same frequency. In terms of GPU, Apple still maintains its fierce standard. In addition to more powerful performance, the new PowerVR G6430 also supports the latest Open GL ES3.0 standard, making full preparations for higher level games in the future. For the iPhone 5S, this GPU specification can be said to be sufficient. Among the current mobile devices, it should be the most powerful game performance (only Adreno 330+720P devices can threaten its position). From the latest iPad Air test report, it seems that the A7 on the iPad Air is almost the same as that on the iPhone 5S. The CPU frequency is 100MHz higher, and the GPU frequency is almost identical. At best, the iPad Air will maintain high frequency longer than the iPhone 5S. For devices such as the iPad Air, due to the ultra-high resolution, there are high requirements for GPU performance and memory bandwidth. Although A7 is strong, it is not strong enough. What makes A7 a little disappointing is that it does not use the quad core architecture, and its RAM still remains 1G.

A7 chip internal layout, from

high pass

Qualcomm has a large number of "small partners", so the market share of high-end SoC has always been high. Qualcomm's latest SoC is the Snapdragon 800. I believe that after the overwhelming publicity, everyone has a better understanding of this chip. Xperia Z1, LG G2, Galaxy S4 LTE-A, Galaxy Note 3 (most versions), Fantai A880, etc. all use Snapdragon 800 processors without exception. We have also tested the performance of this SoC many times, and the performance is indeed very powerful. Although the new Krait 400 core has the same frequency performance as the Cortex-A15, it has become the CPU core with the performance closest to the high-end A15 processor because of its ultra-high frequency. In terms of GPU performance, the Adreno 330 of Snapdragon 800 is undoubtedly the first mobile processor. Its fierce performance can almost win all large-scale games under 1080P. In addition, some manufacturers have launched mobile phones with Snapdragon 800+720P screens (Xperia Z1F and LG G Flex), so the graphics performance is even more impressive. Although the various indicators of Snapdragon 800 are also very ideal, when it is applied to mobile phones, there will be serious problems of CPU and GPU frequency reduction. In practice, the "full blood" time is very short. In addition, the Snapdragon 800 will also launch the high-frequency version of MSM8974AB at the end of the year. The GPU frequency will be further improved, and the graphics performance will be further improved.

Yingweida

When it comes to NVIDIA, Tegra 2 and Tegra 3 of the previous two generations are more or less disappointing in terms of performance. Compared with other brand products in the same period, they have no competitive advantages and are inferior in terms of CPU and GPU performance. And this generation of Tegra 4 finally has the posture of "counter attack". Tegra 4 uses a quad core Cortex-A15 CPU with a frequency of 1.8GHz, and NVIDIA's own son's game console Shield has reached 1.9GHz. This configuration ensures Tegra 4's CPU performance. In terms of GPU, NVIDIA continues to be good at "stacking". Although it uses Geforce ULP with the same architecture, it has increased the number of Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader cores to 72 in total (12 for Tegra 3 and eight for Tegra 2). Although the actual performance of the GPU is not top class, it is not too difficult to deal with most games. In terms of video decoding, the Tegra series has always had an advantage and is still inherited in this generation of new products. The problem with the application of Tegra 4 to mobile phones is still the frequency reduction of the CPU. The GPU does not support Open GL ES3.0, which puts it at a disadvantage in the competition with Exynos 5420 and Snapdragon 800.

summary

In terms of comprehensive strength, the Exynos 5420 is undoubtedly the most balanced. The CPU performance is absolutely second to none, and the GPU performance is not far behind the Adreno 330. If HMP can be added again, it will be even more powerful. The Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 have their own disadvantages in terms of CPU and GPU. Although the performance of the Snapdragon 800's CPU is not weak, the performance will be greatly reduced by a substantial frequency reduction. Even in some stress tests, the ability of the Snapdragon 800 to maintain high frequency is not as good as that of the Snapdragon 600. In addition, the Krait 400 core does not improve the performance of the Krait 300 on the same frequency as the Snapdragon 600, but only relies on the dominant frequency of more than 2GHz to improve the performance. The graphics performance of Tegra 4 is slightly weaker than that of Exynos 5420 and Snapdragon 800, and it does not support Open GL ES3.0, which makes it poor in dealing with future large-scale games. The three SoCs of this generation of Android have serious frequency reduction problems on the CPU side. It is difficult to control the temperature when Cortex-A15 is applied to mobile phones. As for Apple's A7, since there is no way for Android and iOS to intuitively compare CPU performance, we do not deliberately discuss the strength of dual core Cyclone core and quad core A15 core. The A7 is satisfactory on the GPU side. After upgrading to iOS 7.0.3, the performance of the iPhone 5S in theoretical testing has been completely comparable to that of the Adreno 330, and the graphics performance is very powerful.

Finally, we present the graphics processing performance comparison chart of these four top SoCs (Tegra 4: Xiaomi 3, A7：iPhone 5S，Exynos 5420：N900， Snapdragon 800: N9005):