Huawei's HiSilicon 810 is the first mid-range 7nm SoC, outperforms the Snapdragon 730

Huawei has launched its latest piece of ARM-based silicon, the Kirin 810 and it is a powerful thing. The octa-core design utilizes two high-performance ARM Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.27 GHz mated to six efficiency focused ARM Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.88 GHz making a fitting choice for devices like its new Nova 5 smartphone. It is also paired with an ARM Mali-G52 MP6 that should produce some pretty decent performance.

As a point of comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 features exactly the same CPU architecture mating two ARM Cortex-A76 cores to six ARM Cortex-A55 cores but is fabricated on an 8nm node. By taking the same architecture down to the 7nm process, HiSilicon has been able to extract 11 percent faster single-core performance and 13 percent faster multi-core performance. It's Mali-G52 MP6 also outperforms the Qualcomm Snapdragon 730's Adreno 618 GPU with up to 44 percent faster framerates.

One area that HiSilicon has been really focused on developing is its neural processing cores. Its new Davinci NPU is actually capable of outperforming Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 855 in this area. It does this by using a Rubik's Cube Quantitative Stereo Arithmetic Unit. Not only is the NPU tasked with image processing, it has also been tasked with monitoring the CPU and GPU to ensure more stable and sustained performance when needed. This kind of performance in a mid-range device wouldn't have been out of place in flagship just 12 to 18 months ago.