Hardware Overview & CPU Functioning

Inside the Milky way A5 is a new SoC to our exam bench: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410. This is an evolutionary step for Qualcomm's mid-range product, and I'm not expecting to come across significant gains over the previous generation Snapdragon 400 that was seen in a huge assortment of $160-400 devices.

The main new feature of the Snapdragon 410 is a quad-cadre ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cluster, which in the MSM8916 in the Galaxy A5 runs at i.two GHz. As I've mentioned in our look at the loftier-end Exynos 5433 in the Galaxy Annotation four, the Cortex-A53 is the depression-power successor to the Cortex-A7 based on ARM's latest ARMv8 architecture. This ways the Snapdragon 410 is 64-chip capable, although I believe only 32-fleck instructions are supported on the Milky way A5's electric current software edition.

ARM'due south specification sheet for the A53 lists raw performance as two.iii DMIPS/MHz, which is a 21% increase over the i.nine DMIPS/MHz of the A7. This equates to functioning in the ballpark of the Cortex-A9, establish in numerous flagships of 2022, but with power consumption on par with the A7. For just a few years of advancement, this is a pretty impressive feat.

Based on this information, I'1000 expecting roughly 20% more CPU functioning from the Snapdragon 410 compared to the MSM8x26 variants of the Snapdragon 400 in equivalent workloads. Both the Snapdragon 410 in the Galaxy A5, and the Cortex-A7-based MSM8226 institute in the 2nd-gen Motorola Moto G (for example), are clocked at 1.ii GHz over 4 cores, providing a great clock-for-clock comparing.

The higher-clocked MSM8x28 variants of the Snapdragon 400, which include 4 one.6 GHz Cortex-A7 cores, should all the same be faster than the one.two GHz Snapdragon 410 in CPU-bound workloads past around x%.

Equally for the GPU, Qualcomm has opted for a minor crash-land to the Adreno 306, succeeding the Adreno 305 in the Snapdragon 400. This GPU is still an entry-level part geared towards 720p rendering (although the 410 supports up to WUXGA displays), and as it's clocked at 400 MHz, we're non going to encounter a significant performance increment over the Snapdragon 400 in GPU-spring workloads, if any.

Other features of this chip include a unmarried-channel LPDDR3 retentiveness controller clocked at 533 MHz, providing 4.2 GB/s of bandwidth. The included Hexagon V50 DSP is clocked upwardly to 700 MHz, and there's back up for 1080p H.264 encode/decode every bit well as 720p HEVC decode. Integrated wireless radios include LTE Category 4, HSPA+, Bluetooth 4.0, IZat Gen8C GPS, and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n.

It will exist interesting to see how the Snapdragon 410 fares from an energy efficiency perspective later in this review. Both the Snapdragon 410 and 400 are manufactured using a 28nm LP process, so there won't be whatsoever inherent gains from shrinking to a newer node similar with Qualcomm's highest-end products.

As for the Milky way A5 specifically, we're getting back up for LTE on FDD bands 1, 3, five, 7, viii, 20 and TDD 40, enough for major networks across Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. Near notably missing are bands to support North American networks, though the region could be supported in i of the many variants of the device. Every bit e'er, check with your carrier earlier making a purchase.

Storage-wise, the Galaxy A5 comes with 16 GB of internal NAND every bit standard with microSD card support. Of that sixteen GB, around 12 GB is usable out of the box. Ane notable omission from higher stop devices is NFC back up, so no mobile payments from the Galaxy A5.

Beyond our CPU-limited criterion suite, the Snapdragon 410 was, on average, 23% faster than the equivalent 1.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400. This is in line with what I was expecting for the jump from Cortex-A7 to Cortex-A57 on the CPU side.

The 1.6 GHz Snapdragon 400 variant was faster than the Snapdragon 410 by around 5-10%, though the Snapdragon 410 saw some wins in Vellamo and Octane. Mostly speaking, CPU functioning is still well inside the bounds of entry-level to mid-range handsets in 2022. That said, seeing performance arroyo that of older flagships like the Snapdragon S4 Pro-powered Moto X 2022 and Galaxy S4 is certainly impressive.