As MediaTek's new light flagship product in 2022, the Tianji 8100 has attracted a lot of attention since its release.
On the one hand, as the first truly new light flagship 5G SoC in the entire mobile phone industry in 2022, the architecture of the Tianji 8100 itself has many highlights. TSMC's 5nm process, high-frequency "four large and four small" CPU design, coupled with the latest generation of Mali-G610 MC6 graphics processor, these have made the outside world have high expectations for the energy efficiency performance of the Tianji 8100.
On the other hand, according to the actual measurement data of our Three Easy Life, many of the theoretical performance performance of Tianji 8100 also far exceeded expectations. For example, its CPU multi-core results have completely crushed last year's top flagships, and even the second highest score in the industry so far this year. Not to mention that its GPU can run out of the same theoretical results as last year's top flagship under heavy load scenarios, and people can't help but be impressed by the degree of MediaTek's GPU "stacking".
In the face of such a Tianji 8100, we can't help but have a bold idea, if it is directly used to compete with the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 for game fluency, will it bring surprises?
Game test: Tianji 8100 light load leveling, heavy load "surprise attack" success
When all is said and done, we found the most representative Tianji 8100 model of this year, Redmi K50, as a test object, and at the same time "matched" a more common Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model as a competitor.
Before the test, we charged the power of both models to 100%, disconnected the charging cables of the two fully charged mobile phones at room temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, and placed them in the fuselage temperature to cool freely. After that, without using any additional cooling measures, the two games of "Glory of Kings" and "Original God" were used as test software, and the frame rate, CPU, and power consumption information were recorded through PerfDog's wireless mode.
The first is "Glory of Kings", we set the picture quality options of both models to "very high frame rate, ultra high resolution, standard camera height", and turned on the "anti-aliasing, dynamic resolution, water reflection" three options.
Tianji 8100 "Glory of The King" has an average frame rate of 118.3FPS and an average power consumption of 3191.5mW
Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model "Glory of Kings" has an average frame rate of 121FPS and an average power consumption of 3490.7mW
Next, we played a match using the same player lineup and the same characters. It can be seen that whether it is Tianji 8100 or Snapdragon 8 Gen1, there will be no performance shortcomings in the face of this level of low-load games, both of which can maintain a frame rate close to full frame throughout the game, and only once at the final victory animation.
However, comparing the CPU main frequency and power consumption information, it will be found that the Tianji 8100 has a more active scheduling of the eight cores throughout the game of "Glory of the King"; while the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is basically "dropped" throughout the whole process under the same load. However, even so, there are only 7 cores in the working Snapdragon 8 Gen1, and the average power consumption in this low-load game scenario is still nearly 10 percentage points higher than the "8 cores full open" Tianji 8100.
So what happens if it's a heavily loaded game? Obviously, at this time, we need to go to the popular "Original God".
According to the convention, after entering the game, first manually pull all the screen settings to full and turn off motion blur. Next, we use a relatively good quantitative route (from Liyue Port under Tianheng Mountain, all the way to Wangshu Inn), run the map while conducting encounters along the road, and conduct about 20 minutes of real game scene testing.
Tianji 8100 "Original God" is close to full frame throughout the whole process, and the average power consumption is between 5.5-6W
The Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model drops frames after the start of 9 and a half minutes, with an average power consumption of 6.5W-7W before frame reduction and 6W-6.5W fluctuations after frame reduction
To be honest, we have also been exposed to the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model that can stabilize the highest image quality of "Original God" at 60 frames, but most of these devices have strong heat dissipation designs, or they are designed on the premise of external coolers. So when the relatively conventional Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model in the test automatically dropped frames in less than 10 minutes of running Protoshin, we weren't too surprised.
What really surprised us was that in the same picture quality settings and the same heat dissipation conditions, the Redmi K50 equipped with the Tianji 8100 was able to run "Original God" without dropping frames throughout the process, and has been maintained at a smoothness close to full frame.
Snapdragon 8 Gen1 model in "Original God", the peak power consumption before the frame drop once reached 10W
Not only that, the power consumption of these two models in the running of the highest quality "Original God" is also different, equipped with Snapdragon 8 Gen1, the model with Snapdragon 8 Gen1 has been fluctuating sharply throughout the test process, the first 9 and a half minutes of no frame reduction, its peak power consumption has been close to or even reached the amazing level of 10W many times, and even after the frame reduction, it still shows a super core frequent "dropout", power consumption between 6W and 6.5W "repeated jump" situation. In contrast, the Redmi K50 equipped with the Tianji 8100 performed much more stably in the whole process of testing, regardless of the core scheduling situation or power consumption level.
More careful design makes MediaTek's counterattack road smoother and smoother
Obviously, whether it is in the light load of "Glory of the King" or the heavy load of "Original God", the Tianji 8100 has proved that it is not inferior to the level of the top flagship SoC in terms of actual game performance, and also has a much better power control ability.
So the question is, why can Tianji 8100 achieve this kind of "anti-killing" in practical application scenarios, especially game scenarios?
In our view of Sanyi Life, the key lies in the following points. First of all, compared with MediaTek's past similar positioning products, or some previous "light flagship" SoCs, the architecture design of The Tianji 8100 this time clearly attaches great importance to energy efficiency ratio, compatibility, and game performance.
For example, it did not use the latest ARM v9 architecture that needs to be continuously polished by the industry, but chose the mature Cortex-A78 + Cortex-A55 "golden oil" combination.
Four large and four small mature architecture CPUs, so that Tianji 8100 does not have super-large core overheating troubles
Specifically, it doesn't have the popular "supercore" design, which means that when faced with a heavy load scenario (such as Protosthesis), four large cores can carry multi-threaded loads at the same frequency at the same time. In contrast, the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 with "super core" at this time will be overheated due to the super core "dropped", but only 3 large cores are left, and the result is that the frame rate is lost to the Tianji 8100.
Secondly, while the CPU attaches importance to energy efficiency ratio, Tianji 8100 adopts a relatively "luxurious" configuration in some other functional components.
For example, its memory subsystem adopts the 16-bit quad-channel LPDDR5 specification, making its memory bandwidth reach exactly the same level as the top flagship.
For example, it chose the new Mali-G610 MC6 GPU. The new GPU architecture has twice the number of execution units than the previous generation, meaning it can actually be seen as the "successor" to the Mali-G78 MC12, rather than as a successor to the Mali-G78 MC6.
In addition, in the APU, ISP, DSP and other parts, Tianji 8100 has greatly borrowed the architectural design of MediaTek's flagship product Tianji 9000, and has also "inherited" the latest technology of Tianji 9000 in many functions. Among them, MediaTek's self-developed global energy efficiency optimization technology has played a key role in achieving high energy efficiency for Tianji 8100. This technology can achieve full-scenario power consumption optimization by covering different IP modules of the chip in an all-round way. To put it simply, according to the actual usage scenarios of users, the load of the mobile phone can be divided into light load, medium load and heavy load, and the corresponding energy efficiency optimization strategy is used in different scenarios, and the power consumption of the mobile phone is ultimately reduced.
Looking at the design of the entire Tianji 8100, it is not difficult to find that the purpose of MediaTek's "pile" on it is very clear. Because they clearly know which parts should ensure performance output and not blindly pursue new, and which parts can actively adopt the latest technology in exchange for performance and energy efficiency ratio improvements. This targeted design idea is the optimal solution given by MediaTek for the current flagship market power consumption pain points, using the more ingenious architecture at this stage to combine each other, and adding heterogeneous computing optimization in actual use, so that SoC can reduce the power consumption level as much as possible while ensuring performance.
Of course, for the Tianji 8100, the high energy efficiency ratio it finally reflects and the perfect support for the game at this stage are not entirely due to their own hardware level. You know, MediaTek has won the top spot in the global mobile market shipments for 6 consecutive quarters so far. This strong market performance will naturally prompt them to harvest more positive adaptation and optimization of mainstream applications.
To put it bluntly, both the high-energy efficiency hardware design with strong targeting and the software adaptation environment that is getting better and better, for the Tianji 8100, the "surprise attack" has become logical. Further, this also means that whether it is for released Tianji products or more MediaTek 5G SoCs in the future, we can fully expect them to have more and more excellent performance and energy efficiency performance over time.