Gadgetory

hello my name is Gary Simms from Android authority now when a smartphone maker designs a phone he has to choose from a variety of different components including what screen is going to use what battery is going to be used and of course what processor is going to be used now these processors really make up the heart of a smart phone and there are a variety of them available today from Qualcomm and from Samsung and from media tech and from high silicon as a Sid Barry owned by Huawei and today we're going to look to see which of these companies makes the best processor for your smartphone so if you're ready let's go now before we go any further we need to look at what makes up these processors actually their full name is a system on a chip or a sock and the reason they called that is because in days gone by really just the CPU the central processing unit was the most important thing in a computer and all the other things that it needed to work were kind of put on other chips around it on the circuit board in fact even back in the days of the 386 and 486 even the floating-point unit the FPU was considered as a sort of secondary trip you could buy a PC with or without an FPU in it now slowly over the years different things got put onto the same die as the CPU so first of all it was the FPU and then memory controllers and then the GPU and now DSPs until you get in fact a whole system on a chip and that's why we get the term of course system on a chip now we're going to looking today at five different system on a chip so first of all we're looking at the Snapdragon 810 from Qualcomm Samsung's Exynos 7420 mediate exhales x10 then we can look at the high silicon carrier 935 and of course we can also look at the Snapdragon 801 for comparison with exception in the Snapdragon 801 which we'll look at in a moment all the processes we're going to be looking at today are octa-core processors that use a system called big dot little from arm now in a big dot little system you'll find that all the calls are not equal some cause are higher performance some cores have better power efficiency if you look at a proselyte the Snapdragon 810 what you'll find is that it has four cortex 8:57 cores for the heavy lifting and four cortex a53 cores for the easier stuff like flicking through the UI or watching a YouTube video now there are some variations on this theme for example - of the process we're going to be looking at today in fact use 8 cortex a53 cores and I'll tell you about those when we get into the details of each processor and we're also going to be looking at the Snapdragon 801 which really was the peak of the 32-bit processor development by Qualcomm all the other process we're looking at our 64-bit processors whereas the 801 was a quad-core process or not not octa-core and it was 32 bit and not 64-bit however it provides us with a good baseline so we can see what was possible yes the year and what is possible today because the 801 was a very popular chip and we'll talk more about that when we get to it in a moment and before we dive into chips to see what each one is capable of doing it's also meant worth mentioning a thing called the fabrication process of course making silicon chips is actually a quite a hard thing to do it actually takes several weeks to make one of these chips from wafer all the way through to a product that could be sent on to the market as you can imagine the small we have to make these chips the harder it is for the manufacturers now way back when chips were released back in the 1970s they were using quite different process technology technology to make the chips than we use today now for example in 1989 they were using an 800 nanometer process for chips like the Intel 486 now by 2001 that had dropped to what was known as 130 nanometer process and that was used by companies like Intel and Texas Instruments for a variety of processes including the Pentium 3 by the time the smartphone revolution was under the way chips like the Samsung zenus 3 using the original Nexus S were made using a 45 nanometer technology and today that number is down to 28 nanometers and 14 nanometers fin fit now the key thing about process nodes is that although they get harder and harder to reach these smaller and smaller targets there are benefits in making the chips on this smaller process node including the fact they produce less heat and consume less power so therefore of course the smartphone manufacturers want to get their foes to smaller and smaller process nodes and as we go through each chip in a moment I'll tell you what process node they have been made on and that is also an interesting figure and interesting statistic in how well these chips perform when we come to the benchmarks let's talk about the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 for a moment as I mentioned previously it's an optical processor not to a 64-bit processor that uses four cortex 857 cores and four cortex a53 calls those cores are joined by the Adreno 430 GPU as well as a DSP and an LTE modem for all that cellular communication now the history of the Snapdragon 810 has been rocky at best because originally when it was released it was accused of having problems with overheating now Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 810 version 2.1 saying that these problems have been solved and to the major part it seems that it has been able to convince manufacturers to pick its CPU as you'll find it in phones like the Sony Zed 5 range and also in the Nexus 6p one final thing worth mentioning about the Snapdragon 810 is manufactured using a 20 nanometer process node and we'll see how that compares to the other processors in a moment so let's talk about the Exynos 7420 and this is Samsung's homegrown chip again that uses four cortex 857 cores four cortex a53 calls however this time with a Mali 760 GPU with eight shaders built into it it's manufactured using a 14 nanometer FinFET process and Samsung have put it in their current range of flagship phones including the Samsung Galaxy s6 the Samsung Galaxy s6 edge the Plus version of those and of course the note 5 now the next protesser in our lineup is a bit different the mediatek helio x10 actually uses 8 cortex a53 cores so it hasn't got any 8:57 cause it's all made up of a 53 cores but four of those cores are clocked at a higher megahertz then the other four and therefore it tries to simulate this kind of big dot little system by having four that can run faster and four that from run slower even though they are actually the same core design now another interesting thing about the Helio x10 is that it uses a GPU from imagination particularly the power VR 6200 now imagination doesn't have too much success in the Android space however it has lots of success in Apple's product because basically all of the current iPhones have used the power VR system from imagination so it'll be interesting to see how this chip performs compared to the others it's also worth mentioning that it uses a 28 nanometer process node and that's quite big compared to the 14 nanometer FinFET and the 20 nanometer systems of the Exynos 7420 and of course the Snapdragon 810 so let's see how that performs when we get to our benchmarks now the last octa-core processor in our lab today is the high silicon killing 9 3 5 not high silicon is a company that's wholly owned by Huawei and it's mainly used in quire ways products including the main test which is in fact the phone why are we using for these tests but I'll talk more about that in a moment now like the mediatek helio x10 the keyring 935 uses 8 cortex a53 cores for them clocked at a higher frequency than the other four and therefore simulating this big dot little system now joining those cores is the arm moly t-62 8 GPU which has 4 cpu shaders it's also worth mentioning that this particular processor is built also on a 28 nanometer process I've also included one more chip in our test lineup for today and that is the Snapdragon 801 now it really is quite different to the other processes I've just mentioned first of all it's only a quad core processor rather than octa-core processor secondly it doesn't use big dot little because it only got those quad cores thirdly it is a 32-bit processor rather than 64-bit processor and finally it uses called combs custom core design rather than using a design from arm itself and it will be interesting to see how this chip stands up in the benchmarks compared to today's flagship devices so if you're ready let's take a look at the actual benchmarks and see what we find out now to perform these tests I had to get hold of some devices that use the different system on the chips that we are testing now for the Snapdragon 810 I'm using a so is 8/5 compact for the Exynos 7420 I'm using a note 5 for the mediatek helio x10 I'm using a redmi note 2 for the keyring 935 I'm using a huawei mate s and for the Snapdragon 801 I'm using it sucked as a t1 or as a you K Z one now one caveat of course is that different phones may utilize these SOC better than other phones however these the phones that I have I don't think that any difference between one model and another model with the same SOC will really affect the overall results I think we do get a clearer picture of how these different SOC s perform now talking of the benchmark it's actually quite difficult to do real-world benchmarking although I will be using programs like antutu and Geekbench and another program called CP u prime benchmark which calculates prime numbers ok you'll find that a lot of these benchmarks are artificial they create a kind of a design artificial workload that you won't see in real life hoping they do tell us what the CPU and the GPU is capable of so I've also included some real-world tests which includes running Need for Speed No Limit to see how quickly it starts up also to run a web browser test using the Kraken JavaScript benchmark and I've also written two benchmarks myself one which performs lots lots of mathematical calculations another one that performs a 2d physics water simulation to see how well these phones perform without using the standard benchmarks because who knows maybe they even cheat has that been heard of they even cheat when they see these benchmarks but they can't cheat on the ones I've written myself so let's first of all start and see how antutu fares on all these different devices now I ran two and two two benchmarks on each of these devices first I ran it when each phone was cool hadn't been doing anything probably just been rebooted and then I ran it to get a base mark level of performance for each of these SOC s I then let FX Hitler run in its guided tour mode for 30 minutes with the hope that it might heat up the phone a little bit and then I ran antutu again to see whether the heat had affected the performance and these are the results that we got and as you can see the Exynos four-twenty is the fastest CPU according to and - - next comes the Snapdragon 810 followed by the Kiran 935 and then interesting enough by the Snapdragon 801 which manages to beat the hell yo x10 by quite a margin as you can see after I ran Epic Citadel for 30 minutes the benchmarks have changed now there are two interesting things here first of all the Snapdragon 801 actually performed better when it was slightly warmed up the ki-rin 935 managed to maintain its performance level and the other three or dip slightly however even with these changes the Exynos 7420 is still the fastest processor according to and - - now the next benchmark Iran was Geekbench now each page gives us two numbers first of all gives us a single core number which means the test is running just one core on the phone it doesn't matter when you got octa-core or a Decker core or a quad core phone it will only use one core to run the test that will tell us how fast each individual core is it then also gives us a multi-core score which means it farms out the benchmark across all the calls in the processor and tells us what speed can be achieved there and just like with the antutu benchmark what I actually did was after Iran air FX into the upper 30 minutes I then ran and - - and then very quickly I also ran Geekbench to see how the Heat had affected the overall outcome let's have a look at the results as you can see for the single core results again the Exynos 7420 is the fastest with a score of 1504 this is followed by again the Snapdragon 810 and then this time again we see the Snapdragon 801 is performing very well followed by the Helio x10 and the kidron nine three five now again after epics develop in running for 30 minutes I reran the tests we can see the Snapdragon 810 actually did marginally better as did the Snapdragon 801 however the Exynos 7420 remained basically the same as did the Helio x10 with a slight dip only on the Kiran 935 as for the multi-core results again we see the Exynos 7420 is the fastest processor according to the multi-core part or Geekbench however interestingly we find that the Helio x10 has a very good score and in fact beats the Snapdragon 10 which comes into third place fourth we have the quirian 935 and finally the Snapdragon 801 which only is a quad-core processor and therefore doesn't do so well on a multi-core test now again after running Epic Citadel for 30 minutes I went away and ran and - - and then ran Geekbench and again we can see that some of the numbers are quite interesting again the Snapdragon 801 d better after had been heated up the keyring 935 Auto did better after it been playing Epic Citadel the other three had dropped slightly but again it remains that the Exynos 7420 is the fastest CPU according to Geekbench and the Helio x10 comes in at second place now for this third test I use CPU Prime mark a program that just calculates lots and lots of prime numbers and sees how quickly the SOC can do it now this time to heat up the process of what I did was I made the initial run and then I recorded 10 minutes of HD video not 4k video HD video on each phone and then reran the test to see whether the heat produced by recording HD video change the result it took up tall and of course it has so let's have a look at them and as you can see the Exynos 7420 is again the fastest processor according to cpu prime benchmark next comes a Snapdragon 810 then we have the Helio x10 followed by the ki-rin 935 and finally the Snapdragon 801 now after recording HD video for 10 minutes we find that some of the scores altered but some of the schools didn't significantly change at all for example the Exynos 7420 remains basically the same and in fact the killing 935 does slightly better and the Snapdragon 801 remains basically the same the only one that dropped significantly was the Snapdragon 810 which we see had quite a big drop from 20,000 271 to 18,000 935 now an attempt to reproduce real-world situations real-world scenarios rather than relying on benchmarks I did a test where I started up the game Need for Speed No Limit actually takes quite a few seconds to start up that game and I measured it on each of the devices to see how well they did now hear the results the slowest for starting up the game was in fact the Snapdragon 810 which was quite unusual compared to the other things we've seen the other benchmarks that we've seen the fastest of course was the external 7 420 but it was matched by the keyring 935 in the huawei mate s and then you get very close the mediatek helio x10 and the Snapdragon 801 both at 33 and 34 seconds respectively so there's obviously quite a big difference between the Exynos 7420 at 28 seconds compared to the Snapdragon 810 at 43 seconds now as a caveat some other things that come into play here example how fast is the flash memory on the particular device so although this does give us a real-world test it isn't purely just about the SOC there are other factors including however still the Exynos 7420 in the note 5 comes out fastest now we all use our smartphones for web browsing and how well our smart phone can handle webpages how well it can handle javascript is very important therefore I ran each phone through a test called Kraken which is a JavaScript performance test to see how well each one performed and let's look at the graph now in this particular graph shorter is better as we can see the external 7420 again comes out top followed by that is the Snapdragon 810 with a very good close score in fact then you'll find the Snapdragon 801 performing excellently here and a pretty bad showing by the Helio x10 and the cueing 935 which are almost double in fact almost triple some of the scores from the other processors found to be benchmarks are ones that I wrote myself the first one is more of a mathematical bra power one let's see how well the process is doing things like calculating sha-1 hashes or finding prime numbers or doing a bubble sort on a very very large table now after all these things are done the time that it took to perform all those tasks is displayed and it's displayed in milliseconds so let's have a look to see what the results are now interestingly enough the Snapdragon 810 came out top in this particular set of tests with a score of 22,000 937 a remember shorter is better because it did it quicker in this particular set of tests this was then followed by the Exynos 7420 followed then by the Snapdragon 801 not the first time it's in third place it still is a very good processor and then followed by the quirian 935 and in last place the Helio x10 that's really quite interesting too the result Snapdragon 810 came out top Snapdragon 801 came in third and the Exynos 7420 stuck there in the middle between the two now the final of my custom benchmarks which I wrote is one that uses a 2d physics engine to simulate water filling up a container now the idea is that every frame a new drop of water is added into the container and the physics engine and the CPU need to process all of that physics information to see how the container fills up now the program is designed to run at 60 frames per second over a 90 second interval that means a maximum 5,400 drops of water can be added to the container now when the SOC cannot keep up with all that work frames will be dropped and drops of water will not be added into the container so the maximum score is 5,400 and will now see how well those phones did in comparison to each other let's have a look at the graph now the Exynos 7420 did the best with five thousand three hundred and fifty nine to almost manage full speed but not quite next you have the Snapdragon 801 again performing very very well with five thousand three hundred and forty four then you have the Helio x10 coming in at five thousand two hundred and fifty five very close to that was a Snapdragon 810 but it's a fourth-place showing for this particular SOC this time and finally the weakest of the bunch for this particular test was the killing nine three five so does all this mean well first of all I want to talk about the Snapdragon 801 it really did a great job in fact it performed really well against these octa-core 64-bit processors in fact if I had to choose between a phone with a low-end 64-bit processor let's say the Snapdragon 410 or the Snapdragon 801 I think I would go with the 801 every time still got lots of life in it and I'm sure we're going to see it in lots of mid-range and maybe in a couple of years time in low-end phones that will really we'll still have a lot of life and a lot of longevity in them so congratulations for Cole Krum for the Snapdragon 801 however when it comes to the Snapdragon 810 and the Exynos 7420 the samsung processor is clearly the winner I think the Sampson Prasad won almost all of the benchmarks and really the Snapdragon 810 came in behind it but it always was just that little bit slower and as for the other two there's not much to to choose between them the helios x10 and the kiri 935 are pretty much evenly matched throughout these different benchmarks sometimes one was better than the other but overall I think it's are probably they're good processors for mid-range phones maybe mid high-end phones and so in a nutshell the external 7 420 is the best processor out there at the moment for Android devices the Snapdragon 810 comes in close behind it and then in joint third place will find the keyring 935 and the Helio x10 but don't forget about the Snapdragon 801 it's still got lots of life in it well my name is Gary Sims from Android authority I hope you enjoyed this benchmarking video today if we did please do give it a thumbs up also please don't forget to subscribe to and rathore ''tis youtube channel you'll find links here above for subscribing to the YouTube channel and for social media also don't forget to check out what my colleagues Android Authority are doing with the videos that are linked here on the side now as for me I'll see you in my next video now the lasted at least a little bit a little loop so I'm sure we'll see more and more in mid-range phones and it maybe in a year or two in low-end phone and it real really will rule it a little early and then close behind it is the Snapdragon 810 which although it didn't really really