Mediatek Helio G95 vs HiSilicon Kirin 970

Mediatek Helio G95

The Mediatek Helio G95 is an upper mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2020. It is manufactured in a 12 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.05 GHz and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (max. 2 GHz) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The chip also integrates a ARM Mali-G76 3EEMC4 (should be a MP4 - four cluster variant) clocked at 900 MHz. Compared to the similar Helio G90T, the difference is the 100 MHz higher clocked graphics card.

Furthermore, the integrated LTE modem supports Cat-12 600 Mbps download and Cat-13 150 Mbps upload speeds. Wi-Fi 5 is also integrated (a/b/g/n/ac). The memory controller supports LPDDR3 and LPDDR4x with up to 2,133 MHz with up to 10 GB capacity.

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.