Honor 4x - Battle of the brain , Snapdragon 410 vs Kirin 620

Honor 4x is the latest phone available from the Huawei stable under the sub branding of Honor. The 5.5 inch mid tier phablet is the latest but not the greatest in the Honor line. One thing that this Honor 4x bring to the table is this would be the first 64bit SoC available on any Honor phone. The 64bit capability is not with its own twist with Honor 4x came in two different SoC model.

The recently available Honor 4x in Malaysia came with Huawei owned Kirin 620, this is very different from the earlier batch that was sold in India that was powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410. Both of these SoC is 64bit enable running on ARM's A53 architecture but running in a very distinct configuration to say at least. This post will look at both options available and what would stand out in both of these processor option.

Architecture Overview

Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 is build on 4 core A-53r0p0, the earliest design reference for A-53 and only support native ARMv7 versus the later support of AArch32 (ARMv8 32bit). This is actually where this popular chipset lack and this is actually not the best approach as other A-53 based SoC is supporting the ARMv8 AArch32. AArch32 have shown to significant increase in performance and battery life thus making this chipset the lowest perfomance available for any A-53 chips currently available in the market. Adreno 306 is not your high-end GPU and that leads to very low benchmark score even lower than the Snapdragon 400 it is replacing.

Hisilicon Kirin 620 in the other hand are built on 8 A-53r0p3, the latest design reference that supposedly increase battery life and efficiencies. This gave a little nudge on the benchmark score but with the low clockspeed (1.2 GHz) and LP process, the Kirin 620 is still one of the lowest performing A-53 chipset available in the market currently. The implementation of older Mali-450MP4 GPU doesn't help much on the performance.

Geekbench Integer and Memory score (include other popular A-53)

The low performance of Snapdragon 410 is apparent in the scores, with normalized IPC (instructions per cycle to the equivalent of a 1.0 GHz Cortex-A7) for the CPU-speed sensitive single-core JPEG Compress benchmark being lower than that of other Cortex-A53-based SoCs, probably due to being limited to ARMv7. The Dijkstra benchmark even scores lower on Snapdragon 410 than on an equivalently clocked Snapdragon 400, and memory performance is also lower. While Kirin 620 manage to outscore Snapdragon 410, it is still relatively slow and would be considered as only a low end A-53 based SoC.

Snapdragon 615, while improving on Snapdragon 410, also appears to be less optimized than MT6732/MT6752 in terms of single-core IPC, despite a very similar clock frequency. Looking at multi-core performance, MT6752 is significantly faster than Snapdragon 615, largely due to being able run all eight cores at the maximum clock frequency. MT6732 and MT6752 also have significantly higher memory performance, reaching an impressive score for devices with a 32-bit memory interface





Conclusion

The difference between Kirin 620 and Snapdragon 410 Honor 4x might not be significant at all and would be sufficient enough for any daily driver. The biggest difference between these is in the app optimization as Kirin is still relatively unknown in the world leading to high-end mobile game are showing Kirin SoC as unsupported GPU even if it met all the requirements. Snapdragon 410 in the other hand is a well known SoC that would not be met with unsupported CPU even when it is actually lower than Kirin 620.



Even if Kirin 620 is marketed as a fast 64Bit SoC by Huawei, the benchmark score shown that i could only beat the lowest available SoC in Snapdragon 410 and is miles away from other 64Bit SoC in the market such as Snapdragon 615 and the Medaitek MT6752. One thing that we can hope to see from Kirin 620 is the improvement in battery life mainly because of the r3p0 updated reference design and the lower clock speed that it is running on.

How do you rate your Honor 4X and which one do you think is better?

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