Gauge Newsletter January 2019 | Page 50

Brand/Details Chipset Released Date CPU Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 (SDM845) 2018 02 Kryo 385: 4 x ARM Cortex-A75 + 4 x ARM Cor- tex-A55 Apple A12 (iP- hone XS Max) A12 Bionic Samsung Exynos 9810 HiSilicon Kirin 970 2018 02 2017 10 4 x Custom-ARM 4 x ARM Cortex + 4 x ARM Cor- A 53 + 4 x A73 tex-A55 Max CPU Fre- quency GPU 2.8 GHz Antutu Geek Bench 4 (Single Core) Geek Bench 4 (Multi Core) 265 569 2 241 2018 09 Hexa-core: 2 × high perfor- mance Vortex + 4 × high efficien- cy Tempest 2.5 GHz 2.9 GHz (2.7 GHz in S9+) Apple-designed Mali G72 MP18 4 core 342 949 247 771 4 820 3 368 8 391 11 060 Adreno 630 Huawei 8 675 2.4 GHz Mali G72 Mali12 173 757 1 900 6 668 In modern smartphone SoC designs, typically two or more processing core designs are used within the same SoC. That designing type is called heterogeneous computing. In layman’s terms, it refers to systems that use more than one kind of processors or cores. All the 4 SoCs found in the above table use a heterogeneous computing architecture called ARM’s big. LITTLE technology. It is a computing architecture developed by ARM Holdings. Within that architecture, relatively slower, battery-saving cores (LITTLE) and relatively more powerful and power-hungry ones (big) are both used. From a ‘raw processing power’ perspective, the fastest available mobile SoC for a smartphone is the Apple A12 Bionic chip (as of October 2018). The A12 processor first appeared on September 12, 2018. This processor is in the heart of the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. At the other end of the spectrum, there are the Android-powered smartphones. They have non-Apple chips as their SoCs. In the world of Android, the best performing SoC is the Snapdragon 845 (SDM845) by Qualcomm. Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+, OnePlus 6, Oppo Find X and few other 2018 flagship smartphone devices have made use of this chip. Other notable SoC manufacturers are MediaTek, HiSilicon, Samsung, and Intel. One of the easiest ways to stack up how processors perform against each other is to find out the Benchmark scores. AnTuTu and GeekBench 4 are two of the most popular benchmarking tools that the industry is using. GeekBench scores convey an idea about the raw CPU performance, and the AnTuTu one will give an overall idea about the performance of the SoC. (Higher the score the better the performance). According to the GeekBench single-core and multi-core scores, Apple A12 Bionic chip is the best performing SoC. PAGE| 48 University of Peradeniya GAUGE Magazine