HiSilicon Kirin 810 vs Samsung Exynos 9810

HiSilicon Kirin 810

The HiSilicon Kirin 810 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2019 and contains 8 processor cores. Two fast ARM Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.27 GHz and six small power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores with up to 1.88 GHz (bigLITTLE). Furthermore, the SoC integrates a mid range graphics card called ARM Mali-G52 MP6 with 6 clusters. For AI acceleration, the Kirin 810 integrates a Ascend D100 Lite NPU (Da Vinci architecture). The integrates LTE modem supports Cat.12/13 with Dual Sim VoLTE. For photography, the Kirin 810 integrates the Kirin ISP4.0. The memory controller supports LPDDR4X at up to 2133 MHz. Furthermore, WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0 are integrated in the chip.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern 7nm process at TSMC and therefore should be very energy efficient.

Samsung Exynos 9810

The Samsung Exynos 9 9810 is a mobile SoC for smartphones and tablets. It was announced early 2018 and should be integrated in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 series (at least partly). It integrates eight CPU cores (octa core) in two clusters. The performance cluster integrates four Samsung M3 at 2.9 GHz and the power efficiency cluster four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at 1.9 GHz. The Samsung M3 cores are based on Samsungs own design and now offer a wider pipeline, improved cache memory and bigger caches. This leads to a twice as fast single-core performance and a 40 percent improved multi-core performance according to Samsung (most likely compared to the previous Exynos 8898).

The integrated LTE modem also got a siginifcant upgrade and now supports Cat.18/13 LTE for up to 1.2 Gbps download and 200 Mbps upload. This is achieved with 6x20 MHz CA, 256-QAM in download and 2x20 MHz in upload.

As a GPU, Samsung integrates a ARM Mali G72MP18 (only 18 clusters, compared to the 20 clusters of the predecessor G71MP20). Most likely Samsung increases performance due to a higher core clock of the graphics card.

The memory controller looks similar to the 8898 and supports LPDDR4x 1800 MHz. The video engine now also supports 10 bit videos (as before 4k120 H.265/HEVC, H.264 and VP9 de- and encoding). 

The SoC is produced at Samsung in the new 10nm LPP process (the Exynos 8898 still used the 10nm LPE process) that should also help with some of the performance gains.