SNAPDRAGON v/s MEDIATEK

By - HRISHIKESH MISHRA

Hello Guys! ,today we are going to compare two most powerful chipset companies and compare them with their overall power and performance....

Because a month ago ..when I was about to buy a new smartphone I was pretty confused on this competition....

So let's begin...

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The two companies have been the dominant third-party chipset providers for several years now, following the withdrawal of players like Texas Instruments, Intel, and ST-Ericsson’s NovaThor.

We’ve put together a handy primer on the MediaTek vs Qualcomm, covering their differences and reasons why a company would opt for one or the other.

CPU technology:

The Snapdragon 845 chipset.

Credit: David Imel / Android Authority

When it comes to the all-important CPUs, Qualcomm has a history of creating its own Kryo cores. Since 2017, however, the company has settled on semi-custom designs (dubbed Kryo Gold or Kryo Silver). These designs are based on standard Arm CPU cores, with a few tweaks for power consumption and performance.

Meanwhile, MediaTek uses standard Arm CPU cores for its processors, without modifying them to the same degree as Qualcomm.

Qualcomm uses the latest and greatest Arm CPU cores whenever they’re available, as is the case with the new Snapdragon 675 and more recently the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. Both of these chips use Arm’s bleeding-edge Cortex-A76 cores. MediaTek, on the other hand, has only recently switched to the Cortex-A75 core for the Helio P90. And as the name implies, the Cortex-A75 is an older (but still capable) CPU core.

The long and short of it is Qualcomm and MediaTek both use the same CPU cores, but Qualcomm tends to adopt new cores at a faster pace.

GPUs: Qualcomm’s secret weapon?

GPUs are Qualcomm’s biggest advantage, thanks to its secretive Adreno graphics technology. This was borne out of Qualcomm’s acquisition of AMD’s handheld graphics chip business (Adreno is an anagram of Radeon, AMD’s graphics brand).

The company’s Adreno GPUs recently trumped Arm’s Mali GPUs in benchmarks — just compare graphics benchmarks of the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy S9 and its Exynos-powered variant (which uses Arm GPU tech).

Manufacturers like Samsung and Huawei generally opt to simply use more Arm Mali GPU cores to reduce the gap to Qualcomm’s hardware.

Arm’s new Mali-G76 GPU is a big upgrade, in theory targeting laptop-class performance. But Qualcomm isn’t standing still, revealing the Adreno 640 GPU as part of the Snapdragon 855. It touts a 20 percent power boost over the Snapdragon 845’s GPU, but we’ll need to wait and see if phones with Arm’s latest GPU can offer a challenge.

MediaTek has taken to using Imagination Technologies’ GPUs in its new Helio P90 instead of Arm parts. The company is claiming a big graphical upgrade over its previous high-end chips, but time will tell whether this is the case.

Machine learning

A MediaTek Helio P60 sign.

Qualcomm has traditionally harnessed its Hexagon digital signal processor (DSP) for machine learning tasks in recent years. The DSP usually handles tasks related to audio, photography, and connectivity, but the company tuned the chip (along with its CPU and GPU) for machine learning.

The top-end Hexagon 685 DSP is available on the likes of the Snapdragon 845, Snapdragon 710, Snapdragon 670, and the Snapdragon 675. So tasks like image recognition and other forms of offline inference should get a boost on phones with these chips.

Read: Google in 2019 — All in on AI

But the company has also added a new Tensor Accelerator chip to its Snapdragon 855 flagship processor. The chipmaker claims that, thanks to this silicon and other upgrades, the new chipset delivers three times the AI performance of the Snapdragon 845.

MediaTek, on the other hand, has introduced a dedicated AI processing unit (APU) to mid-range phones with the launch of the Helio P60 chipset. The APU brings features like smart scene recognition, better facial recognition, and more to mid-range phones.

The Taiwanese firm’s new Helio P90 chipset looks like it’ll deliver even more AI power, thanks to the addition of an AI Accelerator chip and a Face Detection Engine. MediaTek is claiming 1,127GMACs of AI power for the new chipset, compared to the Snapdragon 710’s 614GMACs.

Developer support and updates:

If you’re planning to flash a new ROM on your phone, Qualcomm-equipped phones have traditionally been the go-to option. MediaTek phones gained a poor reputation several years ago for developer support (or the lack thereof) compared to Qualcomm. The issue seems to revolve around the company’s policy for releasing source code, which isn’t as straightforward as the U.S. chipmaker. MediaTek has since told Android Authority that it would consider releasing source code to the public, but not in the near future.

MediaTek phones also have a reputation for tardy or missing system updates. Then again, scores of low-end brands have traditionally used their chips, and often lack the resources to update their phones in the first place. It’s not necessarily the chipmaker’s fault if a MediaTek-powered phone doesn’t get updated.

Ultimately, there’s far more to buying a smartphone than which chipset it uses. Would you buy a powerful phone with no features, or a mid-range phone with a great camera, water resistance, and a headphone jack?

If you’re planning to tinker with your phone’s inner workings or want a proper flagship phone, the choice is already made for you (Qualcomm). The mid-range bracket is murkier though, as MediaTek’s Helio P60/P70 and Qualcomm’s popular Snapdragon 660 are similarly powerful, though Qualcomm’s newest 600-series chips blow the Helio P60/P70 out of the water. But the Taiwanese company might see some wins with its Helio P90, thanks to that impressive AI performance in theory.

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By the way I'm a MediaTek Helio G90T device user and according to me it's a great processor in terms of performance and speed under the price range.