Qualcomm Snapdragon V/S MediaTek. Did you choose the right one?

Every now and then, I see people getting stuck on which is better: Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek. Snapdragon is an experienced giant while MediaTek, even with its years of experience, is relatively new. While the field has other players such as the Intel Atom, Apple's A series and Samsung's Exynos, these are more or less exclusive, and most manufacturers choose from the two given above. Today we put the two to test.

How are processors made?

ARM, this is the company that licenses the architecture of your CPUs to the different vendors and then the vendors modify it according to their own use. (Fun Fact- ARM does everything except making it's own processors) It is upto the vendors on how they go about actually manufacturing the processors. 

Qualcomm Snapdragon is a giant and they put in a lot of effort to optimise the overall performance of a device. They tweak a lot to provide  better battery life, a better GPU performance (Adreno) and an overall less heating as compared to it's counterpart MediaTek.

On the other hand, MediaTek takes up the architecture licensed by ARM and usually, starts manufacturing the processors right away. It also uses the Mali GPU which is provided by ARM rather than making it's own. While this does not substantially establish anything, but if a company is ditching the provided GPU in favour of something it made, it's probably better. Of course, this comes at a premium. 

While the odds seem to be in Snapdragon's favour, one must remember that the pricing of a quad core snapdragon chip would be equivalent to an octa-core MediaTek chip of the same class, hence providing for a fairer comparison.
 Taking Mediatek MT6595 octa-core and the Snapdragon 805 Quad-core, and putting them to standard benchmarking tests when compared on similar phones resulted in the following.

ANTUTU 5
Snapdragon 805 - 49800
MediaTek MT6595 - 46920


GEEKBENCH 3
Snapdragon 805 - 3556
MediaTek MT6595 - 3285

Where do we go wrong?

"The bigger, the better."- a common misconception. A few MHz or cores extra and we wrongly pick the processor. What we do not see that if MediaTek provides better benchmarks (low to mid-range phones), there are other issues like worse battery life or heating issues and for countries like India where the ambient temperature is high, this is an important factor to consider. On the other side, while Qualcomm has a brand name, better technicalities, it cannot provide the value for money performance like MediaTek. 

Summing it up, there are more to the processors than the cores or the clock speed. Everything from architecture used to the benchmarks matters, so it is not possible to compare the processors by the name without knowing the history behind it. A small tip- If you have a tight budget and looking for something below Rs.10k,  go for MediaTek but if you are ready to shell out more money and go for the flagships, you should consider vendors other than MediaTek.