Samsung Exynos 990 vs HiSilicon Kirin 820e

Samsung Exynos 990

The Samsung Exynos 990 is a mobile high-end SoC for smartphones and tablets. It was announced in the Samsung S20 line in early 2020. The processor integrates three clusters of processor cores with different architectures. Two big Samsung custom M5 (Mongoose 5) cores clock up to 2.73 GHz and deliver peak performance. Two additional ARM Cortex-A76 are also for performance tasks and clock at up to 2.5 GHz. Finally, four small and power efficient ARM-Cortex A55 cores clock at up to 2 GHz are in the third cluster. The different clusters can run simultaneously thanks to DinamIQ.

The integrated LTE modem supports LTE-Advanced Pro Cat.20/18 (2000 Mbps download, 210 Mbps upload). The integrated graphics card is a ARM Mali G77MP11 with 11 cores.

The performance of the CPU part is positioned in the high end segment for smartphone processors. In Geekbench it offers a very good single thread performance on par with the Snapdragon 865 and older Apple A11. The multi-threaded-performance is a bit below the fastest current smartphone SoCs. In Geekbench 5 it slots in below the Kirin 990 and above the older Snapdragon 855 Plus.

The SoC is produced at Samsung in the new 7nm LPP (with EUV) process.

HiSilicon Kirin 820e

The HiSilicon Kirin 820e is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced 2022 and contains 8 processor cores. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 core with up to 2.22 GHz, three addition A76 cores at up to 2 and four efficiency Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.84 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a 5G modem and a fast mid-range ARM Mali-G57 MP6 graphics card. For AI acceleration, the Kirin 820 integrates a DaVinci NPU. Compared to the similar named Kirin 820, the 820e offers slower clocked CPU cores on a level with the older Kirin 810.

The chip should also integrate Bluetooth 5 and WiFi 6.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern 7nm process at TSMC and therefore should be very energy efficient.