Meizu M2 Note - Benchmarking MT6753 vs Kirin 620 (Honor 4X)

MediaTek's previously announced MT6753, arrived commercially in the form of Meizu M2 Note. With considerably slower maximum CPU speeds for the eight CPU cores, as well as a lower performance GPU, the newer M2 note is not an upgrade as the name suggest but more of a new option for a different market. The lower cost of the MT6753 platform gave Meizu M2 Note a lower price point and gave Meizu the ability to join the lower priced phablet war.

With the new cheaper SoC used in Meizu M2 Note, its now a direct competitor to Honor 4X, the earlier M1 Note is slightly higher priced. This post will look at how does the latest SoC fare if being put head to head with Huawei's own Hisilicon Kirin 620. Both of this phone are priced at 999 CNY and both is using a lower performance chipset that was made to be more balanced in term of performance while giving better battery life.

MT6753 implements several cost-reducing features, including a lower maximum clock speed (reported to be 1.3 GHz for the M2 Note), most likely associated with a cheaper manufacturing process (either 28LP or 28HPC) than the 28HPM process of the MT6752. A significant factor for lower performance is likely to be a reduced size of the L2 CPU cache inside the MT6753. MT6753 is likely to become a significant volume driver in MediaTek's 4G product line.

MT6753 also has a significantly lower-performance and smaller GPU (Mali-T720 MP3), compared to the Mali-T760 MP2 inside MT6752. MT6753 marks the first Mali implementation with three pixel processing cores; previous Mali GPUs either had one, two, four, six or eight pixel processing cores, Most likely, Mali-T720 does not have the memory bandwidth usage optimization that are present in Mali-T760, which together with the more limited pixel processing throughput means that devices with a 1080p display such as the Meizu M2 Note may be impacted in terms of 1080p game performance and power efficiency for graphics-intensive operations.



Kirin 620 in the other hand, uses even a lower performance GPU in the form of Mali-T450 MP4. Surprisingly the recently available Kirin 620 is still using the GPU that only supporting Open GL ES 2.0 where most of other GPU in the current market already supporting Open GL ES 3.x. This GPU would have issue if the display is running at full HD (1080) thus Huawei only allow 720 HD display even if the GPU support full HD. This would still make Kirin 620 able to run majority of the games available without noticeable issue if it was running in Full HD mode.

The MT6753 was designed with cost-reduction in mind, and may use TSMC's 28LP process which has low cost but lower performance. Even with the lower numbers, it is still churning higher number than Kirin 620 that is not that impressive to begin with. Meizu M2 Note might be a downgrade for some M1 Note user but it usher in a new era for Mediatek where better power management SoC is put to the front than just higher numbers in benchmark. With the introduction of MT 6753, this might be the best step taken by Mediatek in trying to find the best of both world in performance and battery life. Personally we think that Meizu might have done a mistake in given the M2 Note name but overall it would be a significant step in building a better phone overall.

More Meizu Note post
More Honor 4x post
Picture source : Meizu.com