Leak suggests that the Kirin 9000's ARM Mali-G78 GPU is a massive power hog

The Kirin 9000 and Exynos 1080's impressive AnTuTu score painted a pretty picture of the ARM Mali-G78 MP24. The flagship GPU can, at least on paper, take on Qualcomm's Adreno 660. However, it seems to be quite a power hog, based on some tests conducted on the Huawei Mate 40.

Ice Universe Tweeted what looks like a GPU power test run on the Mali-G78. The GPU purportedly guzzles up to 14W at full load and about 9W on average. The number is quite high for a mobile GPU, but it is somewhat understandable, considering that it has 24 cores. However, we have to treat these results with a healthy dose of skepticism. The Huawei Mate 40 in question is very likely a pre-production unit running unstable firmware, and we should wait for it to hit the shelves before making any judgments.

It'll be interesting to see how Samsung cools the ARM Mali-G78 on its upcoming Exynos 1080 and Exynos 2100 devices. Bad thermal performance has been the bane of Exynos' existence for quite some time now, and the Mali-G78 won't make things better. Unfortunately, Samsung has no choice but to use ARM's GPUs, as its in-house AMD Radeon-powered unit is far from ready.