New Amlogic S922 review :
Today we present our comparative and benchmarks of the new
Amlogic S922X SoC’s against the all of current SoC in the market installed in the TV-Boxes. This new SoC is a Hexa Core model big.LITTLE with 4 ARM Cortex-A73 processors + 2 RAM processors Cortex-A53 and ARM GPU Mali-G52 MP6, at VPU level we have native support for H.265 video and VP9 up to 4K@75fps with latest generation HDR support. A chip destined for the high-end TV-Box within its sector that faces against the options of Allwinner, Rockchip, Hisilicon or Realtek.
SPECIFICATIONS AMLOGIC S922X
General specifications
The
Amlogic S922X SoC is the most powerful chip that comes to replace the current S912, this SoC has a
Hexa Core configuration with four
Cortex-A73 cores and two other
Cortex-A53 low consumption, in the graphical section we have a powerful
Mali-G52 MP6 GPU. It has native connections for
HDMI 2.1 that reaches up to 4K@75fps compatible with multiple DRM security systems,
USB 3.0 support, internal storage up to eMMC 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet and audio capacity up to 8 channels of audio input and output.
In the graphical section we have an important jump in the
GPU since now it is integrated a
Mali-G52 MP6 up to 800MHz manufactured in 16nm that far exceeds the previous Mali-T820 MP3 of the S912. In the video section on your
VPU we now have an image processor called
Advanced Video Engine Gen10 that allows us to decode the most modern video formats with advanced
HDR support.
CPU
The new
Amlogic S922X Hexa Core SoC has four
ARM Cortex-A73 cores capable of reaching 1.8Ghz with 1MB L2 cache + 2
Cortex-A53 RAM processors with 256k L2 cache, the theoretical maximum speed is 1.9Ghz. This cores are manufactured in
12nm which gives us improvements in performance by lowering the consumption and thermals. As always in this type of products, the theoretical maximum speed can be limited and in our tests on this test model we reached
1.8 GHz as the maximum peak.
- As we see the system supports only ABI armeabi-v7a which limits us to install applications in 32bit.
GPU
For the graphical section we have a
Mali-G52 MP6 GPU with a maximum speed of
850Mhz and performance up to 6.8Gpix / s (2.6 Gpix in the Mali-820 of SoC S912). It has hardware support for
OpenGL ES 3.2 and also
Vulkan 1.0 but this is not activated in the firmware, this GPU is made in 16nm. We also have support OpenCL 2.0 FP, Render Script, support L2 Cache up to 512KB and bus AMBA 4 ACE-LITE. With this GPU we can play powerful titles like
PUBG in medium / high settings.
VPU
In this SoC we find the
Advanced Video Engine Gen10 for decoding that supports
h.265 and
VP9 codecs, compatible with
HDR, Dolby Vision, Advanced HDR10, HDR10 +, HLG, PRIME HDR formats and support for REC709 / BT2020 profiles. This system allows us to take video up to
UHD 4K@75fps resolutions without problems thanks to its
HDMI 2.1 video output that theoretically can be compatible with automatic refresh refresh synchronization, but this will depend on the implementation in the firmware and the technology of our TV.
Android system
The system that we find in this first Box that we are going to review is based on
Android 9 Pie (API 28), the kernel that controls the system is the kernel
4.9.113 with date of compilation
2019-05-08, a very modern version that Take the advantages of this type of kernel. As we said before due to limitations of the API,
we can only install 32bit Android apps, perhaps to avoid incompatibility problems.
PERFORMANCE TEST
We perform several performance tests with the
Amlogic S922X SoC’s, we make a VS against Soch Rockchip RK3328, RK3399, Nvidia Tegra X1, Realtek RTD1296, Amlogic S912, S905X, S905X2, Himedia Hi3798CV200 and the Allwinner H6.
Antutu
Possibly the best known test, we use
version 7 because the data from 6 do not seem correct, unfortunately this test is not compatible with older GPUs such as ARM-Mali 450. With this test we get an idea of the overall performance of the device and We can buy it with others. This test is greatly influenced by the internal storage and other values of general performance, as we can see in
the results this new SoC exceeds S912 and RK3399.
Geekbench
A test that gives us some very interesting values of the
raw power of the CPU in mono core and in multi core in addition to
computing by GPU. As we see in the results indicate a substantial improvement at all levels and
approaches the Tegra X1 less at the level of multicore as is logical.
3DMark
The
graphical performance test par excellence with a fairly solid continuity in terms of results which helps us when comparing the performance of GPUs historically. As we see the GPU
Mali-G52 MP6 defends well and
leaves behind the previous S912, the S905X2 and also the RK3399.
PCMark
This test gives us an idea of the
performance level for desktop applications of this hardware performing tasks such as video editing, managing text or audio files, something that is increasingly used in Android. The result is a sum of all those aspects and is influenced by the general hardware components. The results are quite good and far
exceeds the rest of SoC in its same sector.
Power consumption and thermals
We also make a comparison of consumption and thermal at a general level, then we will see it in detail in the review of each device. As we can see the maximum consumption remains in only
7.7W as a result of the jump of manufacturing process of the CPU from 28nm to
12nm, although the GPU remains at
16nm. An excellent values that affects the temperatures
much lower than the previous S912 or its direct rival RK3399 that had serious problems in that regard.