Is the Samsung Galaxy S8 powered by the most powerful mobile platform in the world? Let's find out

With the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S8 imminent, the battle of the flagship smartphones is about to be kicked off.

What makes a smartphone a flagship, however? A flagship smartphone is one that offers uncompromised performance with impeccable design, usually at an astronomical price. Generally speaking, a phone that fashions itself as a flagship will be available in the Rs 50,000 plus range.

The heart of these flagships is the processing platform that powers them. The performance and capabilities of the device are, after all, defined by these platforms.

As far as these platforms (SoC) are concerned, there are currently four prominent contenders vying to power the flagship smartphones of today. Two of these will power the new Samsung Galaxy S8.

The contenders are Huawei’s Kirin 960 , Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, Apple’s A10 Fusion and Samsung’s Exynos 8895 .

The Galaxy S8 will be powered by the Snapdragon 835 and the Exynos 8895.

The Apple A10 Fusion SoC stands apart here as it’s only available on iOS devices. All other platforms support Android.

Before we delve into them, allow us to explain what an SoC is. An SoC or System-on-Chip is a computing unit that includes all the essentials electronic components to power your smartphone. An SoC will house a CPU for handling computational tasks, a GPU or graphics processor for handling graphics, RAM chips to improve data handling speeds, onboard storage for handling your files, a modem for connecting to wireless networks and a whole host of other chips for signal processing, machine learning, motion detection, audio processing and so on.

Think of it like assembling a PC. You have a motherboard that holds everything together, into which you slot in various components depending on the performance and features you’re looking for. You’ll need a CPU, RAM, storage, GPU, sound card, connectivity, etc. to make your PC work. The combination depends on your budget.

Manufacturers and chip designers have the option to mix and match components as they see fit.

We’d also like to add that ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) usually provides the design for these components. Manufacturers can choose to either license the designs from ARM directly or design their own chips. The latter is more expensive and requires a great deal of technical expertise. ARM, in a bid to ease the design process, now offers a manufacturer-specific customisation option as well.

Now that we have this out of the way, let’s look at the chips themselves.

CPU design: A tie

All of the current flagship SoCs use what’s known as the big.LITTLE layout. Essentially, a CPU is designed with high-performance cores and high-efficiency cores. The high-performance cores handle heavy duty computing tasks, like gaming, while the high-efficiency cores handle routine tasks that don’t require much power. The latter consumes less energy while the former delivers more performance.

This ensures that your device isn’t consuming power unnecessarily.

Barring the Apple A10, which uses a 4-core design, all the CPUs here use 8 cores.

Don’t hold the low core count against Apple, however. It’s how your phone utilises those cores that matters, not the number of cores.

Here, Huawei has gone for a standard design, simply licensing a standard Cortex A73 and A53 core from ARM and integrating it on the board. Qualcomm has gone for a semi-custom design, where they’ve licensed the Cortex A73 and A53 cores as well, but they’ve requested custom modifications to ARM’s design. This isn’t a fully custom design, but rather, a tweaked A73 and A53 if you will.

Samsung has also gone for a custom design, but they’ve also mixed things up. The Exynos 8895 features four custom-built high performance cores and 4 standard Cortex A53 cores for low-power tasks.

As usual, Apple stands apart with its fully custom design. All we really know is that the fast cores are called Hurricane and that the slow ones are called Zephyr. These cores also stand out for being much larger and thus, possibly more complex than the competition.

The Kirin 960 and Apple A10 were announced in September/October last year and use an older 16 nm manufacturing process. The newer Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895 aren’t even out yet and use the newer 10 nm process.

The manufacturing process describes the size of a transistor on a chip. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the transistor, the lower the power it’ll consume and the faster it will run. In theory, a 10 nm node should be 40-50 percent less power hungry and 20-30 percent more efficient than a 16 nm one. Early benchmarks bear this out.

Anandtech’s testing of the Snapdragon 835 indicates that the Kirin 960 and SD835 are neck and neck in pure CPU benchmarks. Apple’s A10 takes the lead in some areas, notably in single-threaded performance, but also lags in some others.

The conclusion is just that Apple’s chip works well because Apple has tight control over its hardware and software. The Snapdragon is competitive with Kirin because they both use a very similar CPU design.

The Exynos 8895 hasn’t been tested yet, and it’ll be interesting to see how Samsung’s M2 competes with existing designs.

It must be noted that CPU performance is also determined by cache availability and RAM bandwidth. The SD835 uses slightly faster RAM here, but Apple and Samsung also use custom memory controllers so it’s hard to pick a clear winner without more data.

GPU design: Qualcomm takes the lead

Here, again, there are marked variations in approach. Huawei and Samsung have gone with a pre-built GPU, the Kirin opting for a Mali G71 MP8, which was the best available from ARM at the time, and Samsung has opted for the Mali G71 MP20, which is the best Mali GPU available today. The Qualcomm chip uses a custom-built Adreno 540 GPU. Apple uses a PowerVR Series 7XT GT7600 Plus for the same.

Early benchmarks show the Snapdragon 835 taking a huge lead over the Kirin 960 and Apple A10 Fusion. Benchmarks for the Exynos chip aren’t here yet, so we don’t know how the Mali G71 MP20 fares in this company. It should handily beat the Kirin 960, however.

An interesting point noted by reviewers of the PowerVR chip used by Apple is that the chip is unable to sustain a heavy load for even a minute, resulting in the low scores.

The Exynos chip also has a leg up on the other designs on the video recording front. While all other platforms support video capture at 4K @ 30 fps, the Exynos 8895 can capture 4K video at 120 fps.

Network performance: A tie

As far as real-world network performance is concerned, the performance difference should be negligible across these platforms. The older Kirin and Apple chips offer 600 Mbps downlink speeds and the newer ones offer 1 Gbps downlink speeds. There’s a variant of the A10 with a slower Intel modem, but even that offers over 500 Mbps of downlink speed.

Considering that even the fastest telecom networks barely touch 100 Mbps and in fact, realistically offer speeds in the 10 Mbps range, this isn’t a cause for concern.

And the winner is…

There is no winner. For now, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 platform certainly appears to offer the best package. The lack of information around the Exynos 8895 means that we can’t comment on its performance.

The 835 does surpass the 6-month old architectures from Apple and Huawei. For now, the 835 really does look like the best option, but the Exynos 8895 is the wild card here . Considering that Samsung will be using both platforms for its device, it’s certainly set to be the most powerful smartphone in the market at launch. We wonder what the scene will be like 6 months hence, when the Apple A11 and the iPhone 8 make their debut.