Huawei Kirin 650 vs MediaTek MT6795: a fight to the finish

The budget mobile industry is booming. Not only are manufacturers pushing highly competitive devices at reasonable prices, but are also fostering innovations to realise such goals. Huawei’s sub-brand Honor recently launched the Honor 5C smartphone in India, which is one of the first devices to possess the game-changing Kirin 650 SoC onboard. However, the affordable segment is dominated by Taiwanese chipset maker MediaTek, with its MT6795 (Helio X10) chip powering a number of devices.

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So, if you are wondering which chipset is better, then you are at the right place. Let’s take a look at the vitals of both the processors before we delve into the finer details.

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What makes the Kirin 650 unique is the fact that it is fabricated by a 16nm FinFET Plus process, which is something that is overlooked whilst comparing processors. While the MediaTek MT6795 processor uses a 28nm fabrication process, the Kirin 650 gets the edge with a finer chip fabrication technology in terms of a faster, cooler and more power efficient architecture. Currently, such fabrication has only been seen on flagship processors such as Apple A9 or the 14nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and it’s great to see companies breaking the price barrier to make such technology more affordable. In fact, Huawei claims that this makes their processor at least two generations ahead in terms of performance and power efficiency than the other mid-range options. Both processors offer 64-bit processing with eight cores. They use the big.LITTLE architecture to assign low resource intensive tasks to the more power efficient cores while the major tasks are pushed to the remaining four faster cores.

The ARM Mali T830 MP2 GPU on the Kirin 650 SoC is a powerful option and should be able to render the current generation of games involving intricate graphics with ease. It also offers comprehensive support for current and next generation APIs, enabling advanced 3D graphics acceleration and GPU Compute functionality. This includes support for the Khronos OpenGL ES 3.2*, 3.1/2.0/1.1, Vulkan 1.0 and OpenCL 1.1/1.2 Full Profile APIs. Additionally, support is provided for the Android Extension Pack, Android Renderscript and Microsoft Windows DirectX11 FL9_3.

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In terms of network speeds, the Kirin 650 takes the throne with the blazing fast Cat. 7 modem which provides up to 300Mbps download and 100Mbps of upload transfers as compared to the Cat. 4 150Mbps download and 50Mbps upload speeds offered by the MT6795. The Kirin 650 SoC also supports VoLTE (voice over LTE) technology natively, which will become critical once Reliance’s Jio cellular network is rolled out commercially. Users can also expect superior network reception with flagship level dual-grade antenna system support which automatically switches to the antenna with the best signal.

Cyberattacks and related crimes are becoming more common day by the day. The need of the hour is to have security solutions inbuilt into our devices that make our operations more secure. The Kirin 650 offers a high level of security with the integrated, chip-level HISEE security solution that ensures user security and handles key information like fingerprints, keypad, call and payment data. Thanks to the support for eMMC 5.1 based flash memory, data transfer I/O on devices powered by this SoC and technology is swift.

The Kirin 650 also comes with the “intelligent awareness” i5 co-processor which is a low-power consuming unit that assists the main processors. It tracks steps in the background without affecting the battery life. The processor also houses the self-developed SLR-level Prime ISP which helps adjust dynamic range and supports hybrid focus technology which reportedly helps take better pictures with your smartphone.

It goes without saying that the Kirin 650-backed Honor 5C is redefining the affordable smartphone space, by bringing flagship-grade features at an attractive price point. The Honor 5C will be exclusively available to buy from Flipkart and Honor’s India e-store.