Mediatek Helio G99 vs HiSilicon Kirin 820

Mediatek Helio G99

The Mediatek Helio G99 is a mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2022. It is manufactured in a 6 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.2 GHz and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (max. 2 GHz) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The chip integrates an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 (two cores). Compared to the older Helio G96, the G99 is manufactured in the more recent 6nm process and clocks higher.

Furthermore, the integrated LTE / 4G modem supports Cat-13 download speeds. Wi-Fi 5 is also integrated (a/b/g/n/ac). The memory controller supportsLPDDR4x with up to 4,266 Mbps.

HiSilicon Kirin 820

The HiSilicon Kirin 820 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2020 and contains 8 processor cores. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 core with up to 2.36 GHz, three addition A76 cores at up to 2.22 (as the old Kirin 810) and four efficiency Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.88 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.

The performance of the CPU part in our tests was slightly higher than the old Kirin 810 (thanks to the fast performance core). Huawei advertises 27% performance advantage for the CPU. The NPU and GPU have bigger performance gains with 73% and 38% more power.

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.