HiSilicon Kirin 710 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 vs HiSilicon Kirin 960s

HiSilicon Kirin 710

The HiSilicon Kirin 710 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2018 and contains 8 processor cores (4x Cortex-A73 at up to 2.2 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 at up to 1.7 GHz, BigLITTLE), an ARM Mali G51 MP4, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller and a LTE radio (600 Mbps down, 150 Mbps up). Therefore, the CPU part is similar to the Kirin 960 and 970 (both higher clocked), but the graphics card is a lot slower. 

The Kirin 710 is manufactured at TSMC in 12 nm (compared to the 16nm Kirin 960 and 10nm Kirin 970).

The HiSilicon Kirin 710F is the same chip with a different package (FCCSP - Flip Chip Chip Scale Package) and offers the same specifications (see e.g. our review of the Huawei P Smart Z).

Qualcomm Snapdragon 850

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 Mobile Compute Platform (or SD850) is a ARM based SoC for Windows laptops. It is a higher clocked version (3 versus 2.8 GHz) of the Snapdragon 845 for smartphones and also manufactured in 10 nm LPP FinFET at TSMC. It integrates 4x Kryo 385 cores (Cortex-A75) at up to 2.95 GHz (max) for performance and 4x Kryo 385 (at 1.8 GHz?) for efficiency. Furthermore offers an X20 LTE modem (Cat. 18 1.2 Gbps downlink, Cat 13 150 Mbps uplink), ac-WiFi and a dual-channel 32-Bit 1866 MHz LPDDR4x memory controller.

The performance of the Snapdragon 850 in Windows is in theory similar to a Intel Core i5 of the Y-series (e.g. Core i5-7y54). However, this is only the case for native ARM64 compiled applications and games. 32-bit applications that are not compiled for the ARM architecture only run in an emulation and perform much worse (e.g. see Cinebench R11.5 benchmark). 64-bit Intel/AMD apps are not supported at all.

The chip is very power efficient as its produced at TSMC in the modern 10nm LPP process. Therefore, laptops using the Snapdragon 850 can be passively cooled (no fan) and should not throttle under constant load.

HiSilicon Kirin 960s

The HiSilicon Kirin 960S is an ARM based mid-range octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the 2018 10.5-inch Huawei MediaPad M5. Compared to the normal Kirin 960, the 960S offers an additional NPU for AI calculations from the Kirin 970. Looks like to be slower clocked than the older Kirin 960.

Besides 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A73, 4x Cortex-A53), the SoC is also equipped with a modern Mali-G71 MP8 graphics adapter, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller as well as an LTE Cat. 12/13 modem. It is one of the fastest ARM SoCs in the end of 2016. The Kirin 960 is manufactured in a modern 16-nm process at TSMC.