Samsung Exynos 9610 vs HiSilicon Kirin 960s vs HiSilicon Kirin 970

Samsung Exynos 9610

The Samsung Exynos 9610 (or Exynos 7 Series 9610) is a mid-range SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It integrates 8 processor cores in two clusters (bigLITTLE concept). Four ARM Cortex A73 cores at up to 2.3 GHz for demanding tasks and four ARM Cortex A53 at up to 1.7 GHz for power efficiency.

The integrated LTE modem supports 4G at up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload. Furthermore, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 are also integrated in the chip.

The on-board ARM Mali-G72 MP3 graphics card offers three clusters and support for Vulkan, DirectX 12 and OpenGL ES 3.2.

The Exynos 9610 is manufactured in the modern 10nm FinFET process and therefore relatively power efficient and also suited for smaller smartphones.

HiSilicon Kirin 960s

The HiSilicon Kirin 960S is an ARM based mid-range octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the 2018 10.5-inch Huawei MediaPad M5. Compared to the normal Kirin 960, the 960S offers an additional NPU for AI calculations from the Kirin 970. Looks like to be slower clocked than the older Kirin 960.

Besides 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A73, 4x Cortex-A53), the SoC is also equipped with a modern Mali-G71 MP8 graphics adapter, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller as well as an LTE Cat. 12/13 modem. It is one of the fastest ARM SoCs in the end of 2016. The Kirin 960 is manufactured in a modern 16-nm process at TSMC.

HiSilicon Kirin 970

The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablet, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 10 in late 2017. Besides 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A73, 4x Cortex-A53), the SoC is also equipped with a modern Mali-G72 MP12 graphics adapter, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller as well as an LTE (4x4 MIMO, 5-band-carrier-aggregation, QAM-256, up to 1.2 Gbit/s) modem.

The performance cluster is clocked at up to 2.4 GHz and the four A53 power saving cores with up to 1.8 GHz. The performance should improve by about 20 percent according to Huawei and the power consumption reduced by 20 percent.

On the chip HiSilicon also included a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for running machine learning tasks very efficiently compared to the CPU cores.