[Android General] ninu elza:
Huawei is a leading telecommunication equipment manufacturer in the world. The company is quite innovative and makes telecommunication equipment like Smartphone, tablets, smart watch, modem etc. Now, Huawei has developed a new System on Chip (SoC) to improve the speed and performance of the Smartphone.

What is Android Smartphone SoC?

System on chip or SoC is an integrated circuit that combines or integrates all components into a single chip. SoC is an integral part of Smartphone which is in-house with CPU, GPU, memory technology, etc. As all components are integrated on the small chip, the performance of the Smartphone fully depends on the SoC.

Different manufacturers develop various SoC with different features (not completely similar). Now have a look at two new popular SoCs - Kirin 650 and Snapdragon 616.

Kirin 650 Specifications

Huawei Kirin 650 chipset is integrated with an octa-core CPU, 4x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz and 4x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2GHz (octa-core A53 (4 × 1.7GHz + 4 × 2.0GHz) ) big.LITTLE architecture and ARM’s Mali T830 GPU, Dual SIM LTE Cat.7 (300Mbit/s) technology, 16nm FinFET Plus technology, and i5 processor.

Snapdragon 616 Specifications

Currently, Snapdragon 616 is one of the most popular SoC on the market which is mainly used in low to mid range phones. It comes with octa-core CPU, Octa-core Cortex A53 (4x1.7 GHz + 4x1.2 GHz), Qualcomm Adreno 405 GPU, 4G LTE Cat.4 and 28nm LP technology.

Kirin 650 Vs Snapdragon 616

Core count and clock speed

Both Kirin 650 and Snapdragon 616 comes with eight cores and the core is divided into two clusters. The first cluster of Kirin 650 is Cortex A53 that usually clocked at 2.0 GHz and the second cluster clocked at 1.7 GHz. When comes to Snapdragon 616, the first cluster of Cortex A53 clocked at 1.7 GHz and remaining set of four cores (second cluster) clocked at 1.2GHz. With this data, it is clear that Kirin 650 has more clock speed than Snapdragon 616. The clock speed implies how much data flows per second. That means Kirin 650 is faster and smarter than Snapdragon 616.

Process Technology

When compared with Snapdragon 616’s 28nm LP technology, Kirin 650’s 16nm FinFET Plus technology is two generations ahead due to its greatly improved performance and reduced power consumption. 16nm refers to the size of the transistors used in the chipset. Reduction in size of the chipset is good to improve the performance and to reduce leakage power. If the size of the transistor got reduced, it is possible to fit more transistors in the same place, thus, it improves the performance. That means from 28nm to 16nm (16nm the transistor fins are tightly paced, thinner and taller when compared to 28nm) the size of the transistor fin got reduced, hence improved the battery life and performance.

16nm FinFET Plus is the enhanced version of FinFET technology. 16nm FinFET plus process technology improves the performance by 65% and reduces power consumption by 70% when compared to 28nm (28nm is used in Snapdragon 616 processor) process.

28nm LP - Low power is a process that is first available on 28nm process technology, which is mainly used for low standby power application.

Faster network

Kirin 650 supports TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, TD-SDCMA, WCDMA, GSM and CDMA networks (also offer Dual standby dual SIM and VoLTE). It is also equipped with Cat.7 LTE, which is capable of downloading 300Mbits/s. Whereas Snapdragon 616 supports LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, GSM/EDGE, CDMA, TD-SCDMA and it is also equipped with Cat. 4 technology.

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a standard for high-speed wireless data communication. The LTE Categories (Cat.) is mainly used to describe the capability (downloading and uploading capability) of the network. There are 11 different categories (Cat.0 to Cat.10) where Kirin 650 uses Cat.7 and Snapdragon 616 uses Cat.4. Cat.7 is capable of downloading 300Mbits/s and uploading 150Mbits/s whereas, cat. 4 is capable of downloading only 150Mbits/s and uploading 50Mbits/s. Thus, the maximum data rate is achieved by Kirin 650 when compared with Snapdragon 616.

Which SoC is best for the Smartphone?

Major silicon chipset on the market uses 28nm or 20nm technology but the Huawei Kirin 650 uses 16nm FinFET plus technology which is two generation ahead when compared with other technology. Both SoC’s has octa core and dual Cortex A53. But still Kirin 650 has better data flow or clock speed when compared to snapdragon 616. The clock speed of Kirin 650 is 2.0 GHz for the first cluster and 1.7 GHz for the second, where Snapdragon 616 comes with a clock speed of 1.7 GHz and 1.2 GHz. When compared with Cat.4, Cat.7 has more downloading and uploading capability. The Huawei Kirin 650 is using this Cat.7 LTE and Snapdragon 616 uses Cat.4 LTE. Overall, Huawei Kirin 650 is the fastest chipset with high performance.