Kirin 9010: Huawei Pura70 Ultra's chipset fails to beat mid-range SoCs in benchmark tests

Huawei made a return to its in-house Kirin chipset designs with the new Pura70 series. The lineup is powered by the Kirin 9010, and the Pura70 Ultra has now been benchmarked, with its SoC delivering some rather disappointing numbers.

Starting with Geekbench 6, the Kirin 9010 on the Pura70 Ultra earns a single-core score of 1,446 and a multi-core score of 4,524. Those numbers are, of course, much worse than current-gen chipsets like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Dimensity 9300. Sadly, however, they're also inferior to older flagship chipsets and even last-gen mid-range chipsets. 

For example, the two-year-old Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 has median scores of 1,741 and 4,584 on Geekbench 6's single-core and multi-core tests respectively. That chipset, albeit in 4G form, was used on the P60 series last year, potentially indicating a generational performance downgrade. Last year's Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 on the Poco F5 (buy on Amazon) scores 1,687 and 4,378 on those two tests, too.

It gets much worse GPU-wise, as the Pura70 Ultra records a 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Unlimited score of 1,531, and an AnTuTu GPU score of 195,380. Comparatively, a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 phone like the Xiaomi 12S Pro scores 2,740 and 479,604 on those two tests respectively. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 scores 1956 and 337,915 on those tests, again showing how far behind the Kirin 9010 is.

From all indications, the Huawei Pura70 Ultra fails to offer competitive performance in 2024. That said, though, like previous devices in the series, it's positioned as a photography-focused flagship and seems to do much better in that department at least.