Samsung Exynos 990 vs HiSilicon Kirin 980 vs HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G

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 980

The HiSilicon Kirin 980 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 20 Pro in late 2018. It integrates eight CPU cores in three clusters. The performance cluster contains two Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.6 GHz, the balanced cluster contains also two Cortex-A76 cores but with only up to 1.92 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A53 cores with up to 1.8 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a modern LTE radio with Cat 21/18 (max. 1400 Mbps download, 200 Mbps upload), 2x faster dual ISP (versus 970), a LPDDR4X 2133 MHz memory controller (34.1 GB/s versus 29.9 GB/s of the Kirin 970) and a 2160p30 H.265 video encoder (2160p60 decoding). The Kirin 980 is produced in the modern 7nm process at TSMC as the first Android SoC (after the Apple A12).

HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G

The HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro in late 2019. It integrates eight CPU cores in three clusters. The performance cluster contains two Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.86 GHz, the balanced cluster contains also two Cortex-A76 cores but with only up to 2.36 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores with up to 1.95 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a neural processor (2 + 1 cores) for AI tasks and a ARM Mali-G76 MP16 GPU clocked at up to 700 MHz. Compared to the 4G version, the 5G Kirin 990 integrates a Balong 5G modem and is slightly higher clocked (2 of the 3 clusters and the GPU).

The Kirin 990 5G is produced in the modern 7nm (7FF+ with EUV) process at TSMC, the 4G version is still produced in the slightly older 7nm process as the Kirin 980.