Romance of the three kingdoms - MediaTek, Samsung, Qualcomm dukes it out with their new ARMs race

[williamcll]

(News regarding Qualcomm will be updated later today)
All three brands have come out with designs equipped with ARM Cortex A78 Cores that are sometimes over 3Ghz. Some Benchmarks have appeared for each as well. Qualcomm is starting their Day 1 keynote which should cover their new SoCs, but some benchmarks seems to have leaked: Currently Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 888 5G chipset on their website, but exact details are not available yet.

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Reportedly, the prototype platform running the Snapdragon 875 scored around 740,000 points in AnTuTu, which is almost 25% faster than the Snapdragon 865+-powered smartphones that we tested. They cap around the 600,000 mark. However, we are pretty curious about the raw CPU performance and more specifically about the single-threaded workloads. After all, the chipset is said to take advantage of a different architecture and core arrangement. One big Cortex-X1 running at 2.84 GHz will sit behind the wheel along with three other Cortex-A78 cores ticking at 2.42 GHz while the energy-efficient cores will be Cortex-A55 running at 1.8 GHz.

 

As for the GPU, it would be Adreno 660 and the whole SoC will be built on the brand new 5nm node. Unfortunately, as of now, we don't have any details on the architecture of the Snapdragon 775G, the successor to the Snapdragon 765G. But the alleged AnTuTu 8 score promises a significant improvement. It scored around 530,000 points as opposed to the Snapdragon 765G handsets reaching merely 320,000 points. That's a hefty 65% increase in performance.

Samsung also recently announced their Exynos 1080, built on their 5nm Process, and is probably going to be loaded into some Galaxy S21 models as well as some BBK brands as well. It is also not certain if the 1080 and 2100 are in fact the same SoC.

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Samsung has decided to go with an octa-core CPU with triple cluster design featuring four Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 units. The most powerful Cortex-A78 core runs at 2.8GHz, while the other cluster of three Cortex-A78s reaches 2.6GHz. The A55 quartet is clocked at 2.0GHz. The GPU is Mali-G78 MP10. It is officially the first platform by the Korean company built on the 5nm EUV FinFET technology and comes as a successor to the Exynos 980 with its integrated 5G modem.

You get support for the latest LPDDR4x and LPDDR5 RAM standards as well as UFS 3.1 storage. It can be hooked to WQHD+ displays of up to 90Hz refresh rate, or Full HD+ panels at up to 144Hz refresh rate. First phones with Exynos 1080 are expected to arrive in early 2021. During an event in China, a company representative revealed that it's actually vivo that will first adopt the platform as it did with the Exynos 980 last year.

Mediatek, known for their Mid to low range of phone processors is also producing much more competitive SoCs this year:

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MediaTek is working on its first 6nm chipsets and there are at least three different versions, likely future Dimensity models. The middle child, the MT6893, seems to be the one closest to completion and we’ve already seen it trade blows with the Snapdragon 865 in an early Geekbench test.

It is slightly behind in terms of CPU performance (matching the Geekbench result), but its GPU proved slightly faster. This result is from a development board with 8GB of RAM, 256GB storage and a 90Hz display (1,080 x 2,300 px). The memory score is also a bit higher than the Snapdragon-powered phone used for the comparison (an Oppo Find X2 Pro). The MT6893 is built around four Cortex-A78 CPU cores – the prime core will run at up to 3.0GHz while the other three are capped at 2.6GHz. There are four A55 cores as well. This is a similar configuration to the Exynos 1080.

Source: https://www.gsmarena.com/snapdragon_875_and_775g_pop_up_on_antutu-news-46478.php

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_announces_the_exynos_1080_its_first_5nm_chipset-news-46251.php

https://www.gsmarena.com/mediateks_mt6893_edges_out_snapdragon_865_in_antutu_test-news-46507.php

https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/exynos/products/mobileprocessor/exynos-1080/
Thoughts: Performance wise they still seem a bit behind the A14 considering it's better lithography and more optimized design. But it's good to see that MediaTek really catching up to Qualcomm and SamSung's performance. Though with phones like this I am still going to wait for the "gamer" edition with the better clocks and cooling system.

[wall03]

interesting.

I still think the A14's performance won't be beaten for a couple years at least.

[Deli]

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[Deli]

The Battle of Red Cliff. Will the underdog wins this time?

[jaslion]

It's good that they are stepping up their game but really for a phone most people are happy with the performance of like a 2014 flagship nowadays. Plenty of mid range to even low end phones offer a more than good enough experience for almost everyone so more power in a phone just starts becoming more useless. However I do see this mattering a lot when using your phone as a desktop experience becomes more popular so that I am looking forward too.

[suicidalfranco]

no cortex X1 ?

[Doobeedoo]

Should be interesting to see these and X1 core. 

[DavidKalinowski]

6 hours ago, jaslion said:

It's good that they are stepping up their game but really for a phone most people are happy with the performance of like a 2014 flagship nowadays. Plenty of mid range to even low end phones offer a more than good enough experience for almost everyone so more power in a phone just starts becoming more useless. However I do see this mattering a lot when using your phone as a desktop experience becomes more popular so that I am looking forward too.

Yes, viable desktop replacement in a phone will be great. BUT I want it to be USB-C, and support triple monitors. (doesn't even have to be 4k I'm using three 1440x900 19 inch Acer monitors right now. so yea..) and good app scaling. I want it a feature of the OS and not a 3rd party option. (unless Samsung makes dex available to every one. I think they are the only ones actively trying to make this a real option..

[jaslion]

50 minutes ago, DavidKalinowski said:

Yes, viable desktop replacement in a phone will be great. BUT I want it to be USB-C, and support triple monitors. (doesn't even have to be 4k I'm using three 1440x900 19 inch Acer monitors right now. so yea..) and good app scaling. I want it a feature of the OS and not a 3rd party option. (unless Samsung makes dex available to every one. I think they are the only ones actively trying to make this a real option..

Huawei and xiaomi are working on it. My fav experience so far is still windows phone desktop mode. It kinda just nailed it as it worked well and due to all the microsoft integration you could actually do most of the stuff a person would need to do on it. I wasn't perfect of course but they were damn close. Sucks that windows phone died off but maybe in the future a windows x fork jumps into phones again. The lack off apps could be easily avoided with just simple webapps most if not all big social and messaging apps have.

[Orangeator]

Let's just hope with Nvidia buying ARM that we will have some serious competition to Apple's silicon. 

[Video Beagle]

9 hours ago, Orangeator said:

Let's just hope with Nvidia buying ARM that we will have some serious competition to Apple's silicon. 

Will that change things, though? My understanding is that anyone could license and make ARM chips, so other than now giving money to Nvidia, it's not much different. I guess it could signal Nvidia entering the market, but might they just use it as a revenue generator thru the lisenceing?

[williamcll]

12 hours ago, Orangeator said:

Let's just hope with Nvidia buying ARM that we will have some serious competition to Apple's silicon. 

Hey, maybe they would bake Nvidia drivers into ARM architecture so we can run RTX cards on mac again.

[Lord Vile]

22 hours ago, wall03 said:

interesting.

I still think the A14's performance won't be beaten for a couple years at least.

Well aside from the A15 and 16 that'll be out then