How Does snapdragon 625 stacks up against snapdragon 650 performance wise?

Snapdragon 625 is a good chip but it can’t give you the level of performance offered by snapdragon 650 because 650 has:

1. Better cpu: snapdragon 650 has 6 core divided into two clusters where the bigger cluster has two A72 core (high performance core) and lower cluster has 4 A53 core whereas 625 has 8 core clocked at 2 ghz but all its core are A53 core ( efficient core, focus more on efficiency i.e., performance per watt).

Let’s look into why A72 is a better core than A53 in performance scenario:
A53 can’t beat the sheer performance offered by A72 core, simply because:

• A72 is a performance oriented core: A72 is a big core having more L1 and L2 cache, more complex circuitry (performance oriented microarchitecture).                                        
• OoO execution: A72 supports out of order execution, but it requires a complicated circuit and complicated logic, moreover it is always turned on so uses more power but gives you more performance) whereas A53 do not support it (less performance).

• pipeline length or depth: A72 has 15 stages pipeline whereas A53 implements 8 stages pipeline. So, A72 will have, virtually, 15 instruction at the same time in different stages all the time, whereas, A53 will be having only 8 instruction. Accordingly, A72 will be the first to finish executing instruction.    
• Branch predictor: A72 has more complicated and sophisticated branch predictor as compared to A53 core. This will bring higher cache hit and so higher performance.                                      

2. Better gpu: snapdragon 650 has Adreno 510 gpu which is more powerful than Adreno 506 provided in the snapdragon 625.


Snapdragon 625 is a good chip nonetheless and has it’s own advantage like it is manufactured on 14nm FinFET (which is a huge plus point against snapdragon 650 which is manufactured on 28nm hpm ) and can give you more battery life and less heating issues while easily running most of the apps but if you are going to compare it performance-wise with sd 650,
Then,
think (it) again!