Samsung Exynos 990 vs HiSilicon Kirin 990

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 990

The HiSilicon Kirin 990 4G 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 2.09 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores with up to 1.86 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a neural processor (1 + 1 cores) for AI tasks and a ARM Mali-G76 MP16 GPU clcoked at up to 600 MHz. Compared to the 5G version, the 4G Kirin 990 integrates a fast 4G modem and is slightly lower clocked (2 of the 3 clusters and the GPU).

The Kirin 990 is produced in the modern 7nm process at TSMC.