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.
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University of Peradeniya GAUGE Magazine