This year we have seen a plethora of very powerful smartphones being released by top Android manufacturers. While most high-end devices are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8XX family, Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek has been claiming its land with their latest Helio X20 System on Chip (SoC) with a record-breaking 10 cores arrangement. The number of cores alone doesn’t necessarily mean raw processing power. Instead, the more cores a SoC has, the better it manages power and energy, resulting in a more power efficient device. However, on benchmark tests surfaced by PhoneArena, the Helio X20 processor scored considerably higher when compared to its counterparts from both Qualcomm and Samsung, and the previous version from MediaTek, the Helio X10.
Samsung has a very powerful processor running under their Galaxy S6 and S6 edge flagships, the oca-core Exynos 7420. However, MediaTek system outscored the competitor from Korea on both single-thread and multithread tests. Samsung is reportedly testing a new Exynos 8890 chip to power a device codenamed Lucky-LTE (which may be the upcoming Galaxy S7), and even this new generation SoC was left behind by the X20, scoring well bellow the X20 on both tests. The single thread for the Exynos was 1336 and the multi-core was 4824 points for the 8890, against 1835 and 5884 points respectively for the Helio. Another big player is the Snapdragon 810 from Qualcomm and it was left far behind by both models, as you can see in the images. MediaTek’s new processor is also far more powerful than its predecessor, the Helio X10. On the single-core test, the X20 performed 40% better than the X10, although the gap was closed at 15% on the multi-core test.
Although this comparison is fairly interesting, it is important to note that the processor from MediaTek is aimed at upper-mid-range smartphones while both Snapdragon and Exynos processors power high-end devices. As so, the X20 does not support features like 4K display or DDR4 RAM, while the other two SoCs do. Nonetheless, the next breed of smartphones will be more powerful than ever, even if you don’t want to spend too much on a handset, thanks to MediaTek. You can already check out the X20 on the new Acer Predator 6 smartphone that was just released during IFA 2015 and ZOPO is also believed to be announcing a new smartphone to be powered by the same processor on September 15th. HTC may also be on the game as the HTC One A9 has popped up on Geekbench two days ago, also running the MediaTek Helio X20.
