HiSilicon Kirin 710 vs Samsung Exynos 9609

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).

Samsung Exynos 9609

The Samsung Exynos 9609 (or Exynos 7 Series 9609) is a mid-range SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It integrates 8 processor cores in two clusters (big.LITTLE concept). Four ARM Cortex A73 cores at up to 2.2 GHz for demanding tasks and four ARM Cortex A53 at up to 1.6 GHz for power efficiency. Compared to the older Exynos 9610, the 9609 offers 100 MHz less clock speed for both clusters.

The integrated LTE modem supports 4G at up to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload. Furthermore, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 are also integrated in the chip.

The on-board ARM Mali-G72 MP3 graphics card offers three clusters and support for Vulkan, DirectX 12 and OpenGL ES 3.2.

The Exynos 9609 is manufactured in the modern 10nm FinFET process and therefore relatively power efficient and also suited for smaller smartphones.