Gadgetory

hello my name's gary sims from android authority now 2016 has been really quite an interesting year maybe there are some things you want to forget in 2016 I hope there are some things that you also want to remember now in the area of mobile processors there's been quite a lot of activity and this year we see processes from Qualcomm and from Samsung of a media taken from Huawei that are all vying for position as the best processor of 2016 so which is the best processor well we're going to put them through the test we're gonna look at some benchmarks and see which one comes out top so if you're ready let's go so we remember at the end of last year the leading protestors were the snapdragon 810 and the Exynos 7420 and they were both octa-core processors using four cortex a 57 cores from arm and 4 cortex a53 calls from arm and they were using heterogeneous multi-processing which we'll talk about in just a minute now fast-forward a year and things are quite different now we have quad-core processors we have octa-core protease we even have a Decker core 10 core processor that are vying for position as the best air SOC of 2016 so this year we're going to look at four different processors the first is going to be the Snapdragon 820 one it's not like an eight to one and along the way we're also gonna look at the Snapdragon 820 because these really are kind of twin processes the eight to one is about ten percent better than the 820 but essentially the same processor what are we looking at the Exynos 88-90 which is a processor from samsung we will be looking at the media tech x.25 which is the Decker core processor from media tech and we're going to be looking at the ki-rin 960 which is the leading processor from Huawei so let's start by looking at the Snapdragon 820 and the 821 now last year Qualcomm we're using cause they license directly from our McCord it's a 57 and the cortex a53 have an issue they use in their own in-house core design and they can do that because they have an architectural license from arm which allows them to design their own cause as long as they are instruction set and architecture compatible with arm specific patience and the core call the qualcomm of design is the cry oh now that Snapdragon 820 may 21 have four cryo calls now two of those calls are high performance calls that are clocked up to 2.4 gigahertz and then there are 2 more power-efficient cryo calls that are clocked at 1.6 gigahertz max in the 820 or 2 gigahertz max in the 821 and those are used for the less computing intensive tasks let's say like streaming video of course the other big thing about the the Snapdragon 820 a 21 is the Adreno 530 GPU which again is a custom GPU designed specifically by Qualcomm themselves now the next processor in our lineup is the Samsung Exynos 88-90 and it's a really interesting processor now it's an octa-core design like the 7420 before it for of the cores in there are cortex a53 calls just like the cortex 7420 from last year and the cortex 53 base a 53 is the energy efficient core from arm that is used for those low CPU intensive tasks like streaming video or checking your email or things like that but at the top end rather than using a core from arm Samsung designed their own core a core called the m1 and Samsung also have an architectural license with with arm which means they're allowed to design their own cause have to be fully arm compatible now the m1 took three years to design and it's the first time that Samsung are designing an arm compatible core for their CPU so you've got four cores designed by arm for course designed by Samsung to give you that octa-core setup now along with those eight cores you've also got the Mali t8 80 DP you this is the MP 12 version which is got 12 rendering cores inside of it now the next process in our lineup is a really interesting one it's from mediatek and it's called the x.25 it's not a quad-core processor it's not an octa-core processor it's a Decker core process it's got 10 cores inside of it this is actually quite amazing now what mediatek have done is they've taken the cortex a 72 core from arm and they've put two of those in the x.25 and they are there for the heavy lifting and it's clocked at 2.5 gigahertz now there are 10 chords that's two of them now the other 8 cores are in fact cortex a53 calls the same as what you find in the Samsung the same was what you find in some of the chips from last year and that a 53 is great at energy efficiency but it's not necessarily that fast so what they've done is they've added in the a 72 and then they've got 8 cores that are caught it's a 53 and these caught is a 53 cause I divided themselves into two clusters now on the GPU side it's also using the Mali t8 80 just like the Exynos 88-90 but the difference is here it's only got four rendering cause the the excellence has 12 them this has four however they are clocked at a higher clock rates so hopefully that clock rate will boost the performance and we'll see when we get to the benchmarks in a moment now the last process we're going to be looking at today is a new one from while always I think all the high silicon Kiran 960 high silicon is a wholly owned subsidiary of Huawei and it's really bleeding edge this process this serpro processor has four cortex a 73 calls not a 72 like the age 25 or like the Kiran 950 before it but a 73 calls which is really the latest call from arm then there are four cortex a53 calls for the power efficiency and then on top of that there is the mali g71 GPU the newest GPU available from arm it's a whole new architecture in fact that arm of designed for their next generations of GPU so this processor is really bleeding edge cortex a 73 and the mali g71 GPU and it could be really interesting to see how this processor competes with the others now I've used this term heterogeneous multi-processing a few times just a quick summary what it means is not all the cores are equal so there are some cores that are high performance and there are some cause that are high energy efficiency and the high performance ones use more power when they're running however hopefully they can complete tasks quicker and they can give you that big performance and then the more power efficient ones are not don't have the same performance they run slower however they don't use as much power and therefore the CPU switches between these cores depending on the workload trying to give you that balance between highest performance and highest power efficiency okay so let's look at the testing now to do the testing I've got three different types or benchmark now the first types of benchmark are basically your standard apps you download from the Play Store and - - Geekbench Basemark and so on and we can be looking at the performance of each of these processors using those benchmarks then the second or third group are benchmarks that I have written myself now obviously I can't test the SOC without it being inside of a smartphone so I've got hold of a bunch of phones to do this testing and these are the phones I'm going to be using for the Snapdragon 8 - 1 I'm going to be using the Google pixel for the Exynos 88-90 I'm going to be using the Galaxy s7 obviously the Exynos variant of that for the MediaTek x.25 I'm going to be using the meizu Pro a6 and for the high silicon Kirin 960 I'm going to be using the huawei mate 9 now on the way I've also tested the Snapdragon 820 to see how it compares to the 821 and I'm going to be using the Galaxy s7 Qualcomm variant for that also for I'm also going to test against the Snapdragon 810 which is one of last year's leading processors and to do that I'm going to be using the Nexus 6p and finally I'm also going to be using the note 5 that actually Note 5 to compare with the Exynos 7420 also from last year so hopefully we'll get a good overview of how last year's processors compare to this year's as well as how this is processors compare against each other so let's start with and - - now as you can see here the winner of the antutu benchmark is the Snapdragon 801 as found inside of the Google pixel second-place comes the Exynos 88-90 in the Samsung s7 and in third place comes to kill in 960 now there's a few things here to note first of all see the difference in the antutu scores between this year's processors and last year's processors we can actually see there's been a significant increase even from the Snapdragon 810 up to the ki-rin 960 we see at least a 30% increase in the performance now the next test we're going to be using is Geekbench four and a Geekbench four gives us two different types of results the first is the single core result which tells you how fast one core is on that processor regard to how many calls there are in total and the other is the multi-core result we tells you what happens if it uses all the cores at the same time to give you the performance of the processor when all of its cause are being used so looking at the Geekbench for single core results we can see clearly the winner is the quirian 960 and that's using the cortex a 73 in second place you get the Exynos 88-90 with its m1 processor from samsung and in third place you get the Helio X 25 which is course got the cortex a 72 so the a 73 is the fastest the m1 comes next and then the a 72 after that so moving on to the Geekbench for multi score tests we see that the ki-rin 960 is the fastest with a score of six thousand two hundred and ninety eight followed by that is the Exynos 88-90 in third place comes the mediatek helio X 25 it's an interesting result from the MediaTek X 25 because it has ten cores now it just shows those ten calls couldn't do the same thing as the eight calls in the eight eight ninety or inside the nine sixty and the reason for that of course is that eight of those cores are cortex a53 causes are very good at power efficiency but they're not the highest performance and in fact the x.25 is relying on the performance of the to a 72 calls to boost up its overall performance now the next set of benchmarks I'm going to be using base mark and a vellum oh no both of these are popular benchmarks they test more the CPU than the GPU although the base mark does also do some GPU testing and what's interesting about the velum o test is that it has inside of it one of the tests that uses is called the dry stone test and the dry stone test is quite a classic put a benchmark test and it only tests integer performance of the CPUs are no floating-point so when it comes to a base mark here again we see that the keyring 960 is the winner then in second place is the X naught 8 8 90 and then in third comes a snap dragon eight-to-one when you then switch over to the ELMO now this time the Exynos 88-90 comes in first place is the first time the exhaust is coming first place so far so well done to Samsung for that and then next we have the h20 notice has a better score than the 821 and then finally have the quirian 960 and then looking at the dry stone scores we can see that the X naught 8 890 is the fastest at integer computing in fact by quite a long way then next of all you have the Helio X 25 with its cortex a 72 cores in it and then in third place we have the Snapdragon 820 again having a better score than the Snapdragon 820 one so now on to my own custom benchmarking the first one is basically just does some math it does some sha-1 hash is it does some prime numbers stuff it just some sorting of a big table and the whole test run then it gives you how long it took to run to the shorter the lower the value the better the score is and the second test is a 2d physics simulation which puts in two drops of water into a simulation every set every frame and there are 60 frames a second that then runs for 90 seconds and the top score should be ten thousand eight hundred and as we can see the quirian 960 comes in first with the shortest test run then his second place we have the Snapdragon 820 one and then a good performance in third place by the heli h25 which just managed to beat the Exynos 88-90 and over to the 2d water physics simulation we can see here the skier Ian scored a maximum score of ten thousand eight hundred drops of water during the 90 second test run that's the maximum that any device can get so Kirin maxed out this test completely in second place interestingly we find the Exynos 7420 so that's the process in the note 5 from last year that actually comes in second place and then in third place we get the exhaust 88-90 the phone that the process of us in the s7 this year and because the Curie 960 has maxed out this test for 2007 we have to write a new one because this one no good anymore now I've also got one more benchmark that I wrote this when I wrote in unity3d it's basically a terrain fly over camera flies over complicated terrain of rocks and and trees and water and so on and we can see here the GPU King is the Snapdragon 820 one with 37.3 frames per second in fact in second place would also be the Snapdragon 820 because it has the same GPU but if we group those two together the Adreno 530 comes in first place in second place comes in the ki-rin 960 with the arm mali g71 GPU and then the third place is the Exynos 88-90 with the Mali t8 80 MP 12 GPU and my first set of tests of the C tests that I use from my java and see comparison loaded earlier this year again there are three tests doing things like sha-1 hash is like doing prime numbers and doing some maths functions and it's just measure how long it takes so al over time the faster the performance and as we can see here the Snapdragon 820 and a 1020 almost identical scores across these three tests so we declare the 820 and 821 as the joint winner for these particular tests then we can see that overall the ki-rin 960 comes in second place and the Exynos 88-90 comes in third since you've all been paying attention so well you've got this far in the video I want to just throw you something a surprise here let's compare how some of these processors compare to the Apple a10 fusion so first of all looking at the Basemark OS to benchmark we see that the a10 fusion beats the keyring and the 890 and the Snapdragon 8 to 1 and comes in first in second place we get the killer in 960 which is no surprise because that's how its scored in the base mark test earlier on and then in third place the Exynos 88-90 and then when we get down to the Geekbench single core test again we find the a-10 is the winner it's got the fastest single core however in second place again we get the keyring 960 and then in third place the Exynos 88-90 and if you think it's all doom and gloom for the android SOC it's not once we get into the multi-core test when all the calls are being used to give you the overall performance of the processor we find that the ki-rin 960 is the clear winner beating the Exynos 88-90 and beating the appellate in fusion in fact the x98 890 also beats the a10 fusion so it's killing first X in our second and then Apple a10 fusion third and lastly I use my 2d water physics simulation again on the iPhone so we've got result across all the different process here and we can see again the quirian maxed out let's test at 10,800 something the a the iPhone was not able to do so now we've done all the scores which one's the winner well one thing we know for sure is the GPU in the Snapdragon 820 821 is X on the Adreno 530 and that does boost the overall scores of this processor in test like + 2 2 and other tests that have a GPU heavy GPU component however when you're looking at the CPU performance we find that the quirian a 960 and the Exynos 88-90 perform better if we kept all the scores GPU NCP and everything the ki-rin 961 the most test out of all of them and it came second and third consistently across the others in second place really is the Exynos 88-90 or because although it didn't win many tests it always was there in second or third place with a strong performer across all the different types of tests now the thing about the ki-rin 960 and about the Samsung is the number of handsets we can find these process is actually quite limited they're going to be in some sang some devices I know that Samsung made to do some contract with a couple of other handset manufacturers while way basically are you going to find them in Huawei handsets so if you're looking for a processor that's going to be in a phone from another OEM say HTC or Samsung or LG then really you're going to have to go with the Qualcomm and the Qualcomm has also proved to be a great Pro so both the 820 and the 821 so my name's Gary Sims from Andhra thority and I hope you've enjoyed my overview video of the processors of 2016 if you did please do give this video a thumbs up don't forget to subscribe to android throw at his youtube channel and also you should download and draw thority app because give you access to all of our news and features directly on your mobile phone but last and not least don't forget to over to Andrew authority comm because we are your source for all things Android